The Darling Dahlias and the Confederate Rose

“The planting of the Confederate roses was a project of the Darling Dahlias Garden Club,” Lizzy said, “led by Miss Dorothy Rogers, whom all of you know as our town librarian. Miss Rogers, will you please stand so we can thank you for helping to make our cemetery the most beautiful in Cypress County?”


And Miss Rogers, blushing as pink as a peony, stood up and received the audience’s appreciative applause. When the clapping had died down, she said, in her prim, precise voice, “I’d like everyone to know that the Confederate rose isn’t a rose at all. It is actually an hibiscus. Hibiscus mutabilis is its real name.” As everyone chuckled, she sat down again, smiling and obviously glad to have set the record straight.

“And there’s another Confederate Rose to be honored today,” Lizzy went on. “Miss Rogers recently learned that she is the granddaughter of Rose Greenhow, whom many have called the Confederate Rose. Mrs. Greenhow served as a Confederate spy in Washington, D.C., during the first year of the War Between the States. In 1862, she was imprisoned by President Abraham Lincoln.” (At the mention of Lincoln’s name, a low, hissing exhalation of breath swept through the audience.) “After her release, she was sent to Europe by President Jefferson Davis”—someone in the back row cheered—“as an ambassador for the Confederacy. Upon her return, she was shipwrecked and drowned, weighed down by the gold she was bringing for the Confederate treasury.” (Someone cried, “Oh, dear!” and quite a few people clapped.)

“Over the years,” Lizzie said, “Miss Rogers kept a piece of her grandmother’s needlework. It was recently discovered that this needlework provides a key to some of the puzzles of Mrs. Greenhow’s espionage. To tell this part of the story, I’ll call on Mr. Charles Dickens, editor and publisher of the Darling Dispatch.”

At that point, Charlie got up and told about the secret code that Mrs. Greenhow used to send messages to General P. G. T. Beauregard, and about the key to the code that was embroidered on the outside of the small pillow that Miss Rogers had kept ever since she was a little girl. Hidden in the pillow were several important documents. He had been in touch with two experts who had verified this surprising discovery. They would be using the information it provided to uncover more of the mysteries surrounding the work of Mrs. Greenhow, who had contributed so much to the Confederate cause.

When Charlie sat down, Lizzy presented Miss Rogers, who by this time was utterly engulfed in tears, with a certificate (printed in fancy letters on Charlie’s job press) that honored the Confederate Rose. Then, as she did each and every year without fail, Mrs. Eiglehorn recited all five stanzas of Henry Timrod’s poem, “Ode,” (“Sleep sweetly in your humble graves, Sleep, martyrs of a fallen cause . . .”), which was first recited on the occasion of decorating the graves of the Confederate dead at Magnolia Cemetery in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1867. After that, Eva Pearl Hennepin, accompanied by Josiah, led everyone in a rousing rendition of “Dixie”:

I wish I was in the land of cotton,

Old times they are not forgotten;

Look away! Look away! Look away! Dixie Land.

In Dixie Land where I was born in,

Early on one frosty mornin’,

Look away! Look away! Look away! Dixie Land

And then, to the very same tune and at the very top of their lungs, everyone sang “The Confederate States of America War Song,” which they all knew by heart:

Southern men the thunders mutter!

Northern flags in South winds flutter!

To arms! To arms! To arms, in Dixie!

Send them back your fierce defiance!

Stamp upon the cursed alliance!

To arms! To arms! To arms, in Dixie!

After all four verses of that rousing battle hymn, the crowd quieted and George Timson played “Taps” on his bugle and the Confederate flag was lowered to half-staff, where it would fly for the rest of the day. Reverend Trivette gave the benediction (he was much too long-winded, as usual), and the beautiful ceremony was over.