The Darling Dahlias and the Cucumber Tree

Mrs. Blackstone’s garden is much larger than the house itself If you stand on the back porch and look down toward the creek, you can probably see why it has been written up in the Montgomery Advertiser and the Selma Times-Journal and who knows where else over the years. Back there beyond the trees are the ruins of what was once the splendid Cartwright mansion, Mrs. Blackstone’s mother’s family home. Built in the glory days of Old King Cotton, it burned to rubble after the Union troops occupied Darling during the War Between the States. Later—in the 1880s and 1890s—its manicured lawns and lovely gardens were carved into town lots along what is now Camellia Street. A row of houses stands there now, each one fronted by a white picket fence.

Mrs. Blackstone inherited the largest lots and a piece of the Cartwright gardens, which was only right, since her mother was the sole surviving Cartwright. Her share of the garden is full of blooming shrubs and trees—including another large cucumber tree—meandering down the hill and into the pines. Inside the fence that encloses the backyard are Mrs. Blackstone’s wide, curving perennial borders, filled with iris, larkspur, phlox, and mounds of Shasta daisies and sweet alyssum. Mrs. Blackstone was sick the last few years of her life, so the borders are unkempt now and full of weeds, and the lilies she loved—Easter lilies, spider lilies, oxblood lilies, and those common orange ditch lilies—need to be dug and separated and replanted. There are tangles of sweet peas and cardinal climber and honeysuckle on the fences, and roses, roses, roses everywhere. Mrs. Blackstone was always very fond of roses, especially those big, floppy cabbage roses that smell like paradise, but all the plants are in need of pruning and general cleanup. Old Zeke, who lives in a tiny cottage the next street over, keeps the grass mowed but that’s about all. The rest is a mess. If the Dahlias want to enjoy their garden, they’ve got their work cut out for them.

If you step off the porch and follow the path to the right around the back of the house, you can see the big vegetable garden plot at the corner of Camellia and Rosemont. Mrs. Blackstone always grew enough sweet potatoes and okra and green beans and squash for the whole neighborhood. The garden hasn’t been planted for a couple of years now, and the Dahlias haven’t yet figured out what to do with it. But the soil is rich, the space large and sunny, and if they want to, they can turn it into flowers or mow it, or whatever. They can even sell it, although times are hard and property isn’t moving very fast in Darling. It might be difficult to find a buyer.

But we’re not finished with our tour just yet. If you walk on around the house to the front yard, you’ll see Mrs. Blackstone’s prize hydrangeas, the old-fashioned weigelas that came from her mother, the wisteria climbing the front of the house, and the gorgeous azaleas, pink and lavender and white, massed under the front window, with a border of hostas at their feet.

And the cucumber tree, of course. It’s such a big tree, and so pretty when it blooms, that it’s earned quite a reputation. People driving or walking down Camellia Street always stop to admire it, especially at this time of year. It’s in full bloom just now and covered with beautiful creamy blossoms as big as dessert plates, some of them. The flowers produce little red fruits that look like baby red cucumbers.

The cucumber tree. That’s what everybody calls it, even though Dorothy Rogers, the town librarian and a Dahlia, insists that it ought to be called by its proper Latin name, Magnolia acuminata. But that particular tree and its twin in the back garden are both over eighty years old and have stood tall and proud since before the War Between the States. As far as people in Darling are concerned, they have always been cucumber trees, and cucumber trees they always will be. Aunt Hetty says that if you called it a Magnolia acuminata, nobody would know what in the Sam Hill you were talking about, and she’s right.

For the club, inheriting the house (and the gardens and the two cucumber trees) came as a huge shock. When Mrs. Blackstone died, everybody in Darling quite reasonably figured that her property would go to her husband’s nephew Beatty Blackstone, the owner of BB’s Auto Repair Shop and the Sinclair Filling Station, and the only living Blackstone. That’s the way property is handed down in Darling, from one family member to another. If you’re next in line, it’s pretty much a sure thing.

Beatty had it figured that way, too. He’d been thinking of this all the while his aunt was declining, figuring that he could sell the house or trade it to the bank in return for the mortgage on his repair shop. Either way, he’d be free and clear forever and wouldn’t that just be swell? So on the day after Mrs. Blackstone’s funeral, he locked up his repair shop, put on a clean white shirt and a tie, and sauntered jauntily over to Mr. Moseley’s law office on Franklin Street to hear Mr. Moseley read the last will and testament of his aunt-by-marriage and pick up the keys to his new front door—only to learn instead that she had bequeathed the keys, the front door, the house, the garden, and the vacant lot at the corner of Camellia and Rosemont to the garden club. What’s more, she had prepaid the taxes for three years, so the club would have a little time for fund-raising before they had to pay taxes again.