The Darling Dahlias and the Silver Dollar Bush

Bent appeared not to have heard him. “From what Liz told me, Alexander dumped the news on her on Monday night, when she thought they were going to the movies. There was no warning at all, not a single word. It came like a lightning bolt out of a clear blue sky. She had no idea he’d even been seeing anybody else, much less—” His voice was flat and hard as a board. “I reckon you know why they’re getting married.”


“I can guess,” Charlie said. “And so can everybody else in town.”

“Which makes it that much worse for her. Fellow that does something like that—lets a good woman down that way—is the worst kind of rat.” Bent lowered his head and shook it savagely, like a bull about to wheel on a matador. “Oughta be taken out and horsewhipped.”

“Yeah,” Charlie said. The thought of Fannie Champaign stabbed through him and he closed his eyes against the piercing pain. “Horsewhipped.”





ELEVEN


THE GARDEN GATE

BY ELIZABETH LACY

Last Saturday, a group of Darling Dahlias met in the clubhouse to put up rhubarb and rhubarb sauce. (Thanks to Mildred Kilgore, who brought it all the way from Tennessee.) Aunt Hetty Little, Verna Tidwell, Earlynne Biddle, Bessie Bloodworth, and your correspondent used the two new 23-quart pressure canners the Dahlias bought with the proceeds from their vegetable sales, and canning jars donated by fellow club members. The Darling Diner is buying a dozen jars so Raylene Riggs can bake some strawberry-rhubarb pies, so Violet Sims says to watch the menu board. We gave the rest of canned rhubarb to the Darling Ladies Guild, which will distribute it. But we’d like our jars back, so we can use them again. If you are a rhubarb recipient, please drop off your jar (washed, please!) on the front porch at the clubhouse, at 302 Camellia Street. You can keep the lid.

At our recent club meeting, Bessie Bloodworth took all the Dahlias out in the garden and gave us a demonstration of proper pruning. She showed us how to pinch the shoot tips of petunias, zinnias, and marigolds to get a nice bushy growth, and how to shear the alyssum and lobelia after they’ve flowered, to trick them into flowering again. She reminded us that we should prune all our spring-flowering shrubs as the flowers fade, for better flowering next spring, and then put us to work on the azaleas, which needed quite a bit of attention. Did you know there are some “self-cleaning” flowers that will drop their dead blooms all by themselves? These accommodating plants include ageratum, cleome, and impatiens. Alice Ann Walker says she doesn’t have a lot of time for deadheading, so maybe she’ll plant her entire garden with them.

Miss Rogers, Darling’s devoted librarian and noted plant historian, gave a lecture at the Ladies Guild last month on the uncommon names of some of the common plants we grow in our gardens. For example, Miss Rogers says that the name of Lunaria annua comes from the Latin luna, or moon, which refers to the round, silvery seed pods. In olden times, this plant was thought to have magical properties, such as being able to unshoe horses that stepped on it. Some old-timers thought it brought bad luck and wouldn’t have it in their gardens, while others thought it brought abundance and good luck and planted lots of it. Lunaria (which belongs to the cabbage family) is also called moonwort, moonshine, silver plate, silver pennies, silver dollars, money-in-both-pockets, and pennies-in-a-purse. People who think it’s bad luck call it the Devil’s halfpence and the Judas coin (referring to the thirty pieces of silver Judas was given to betray Jesus). Most of us, though, call it honesty. Miss Rogers says nobody knows exactly why, but maybe it’s because the seed pods are so transparent that you can see through them to the seeds inside, which makes as much sense as any other explanation.