The Darling Dahlias and the Naked Ladies

“We managed all right without her,” Lizzy added, looking around appreciatively. “The garden hasn’t looked so pretty for quite a while. Mrs. Blackstone couldn’t do much in her last years.”


The small white frame house the garden club had inherited from Mrs. Dahlia Blackstone sat fairly close to Camellia Street. Behind the white picket fence out front, the yard was mostly hydrangeas and azaleas and roses. But behind the house, a large garden swept down toward a tall magnolia tree, a clump of woods, and a small, clear spring smothered in ferns, bog iris, and pitcher plants. This garden had once been so beautiful that it had been written up in newspapers all over the South, and as far away as New Orleans. But as Mrs. Blackstone grew older and less able to care for it, the plants had become disheveled and shaggy, in the ragamuffin way of gardens when there’s nobody to pull weeds or deadhead or prune the roses or dig and separate the perennials or even mow the grass regularly.

Then Mrs. Blackstone had died and left her house and the garden to the garden club she had founded, whose grateful members quickly renamed themselves the Dahlias in her honor. Then they (well, most of them, anyway) pulled on their garden gloves and picked up their rakes and hoes and trowels and clippers and set about restoring the garden to its former glory. They had yanked the smothering weeds—the dog fennel, henbit, ground ivy, and (the biggest garden bully of all!) the Johnson grass—out of the curving perennial borders, so that the phlox, larkspur, iris, asters, and Shasta daisies could take a deep breath. They had dug and divided and replanted Mrs. Blackstone’s much-loved lilies: Easter lilies, spider lilies, oxblood lilies, and her favorite orange ditch lilies. They had untangled the cardinal climber and crossvine and honeysuckle on the fence and repaired the trellises so the mandevilla and confederate jasmine could stretch up and out. They gently disciplined the hibiscus and the dozens of roses, including the climbers, the teas, the ramblers, the shrubs, and a charming yellow Lady Banks. Yet to be done: the cleanup of the woodland and spring at the foot of the garden, where Miss Rogers thought they ought to put the bog garden. And every time a Dahlia set foot on the place, she saw something else that needed to be done, such as painting the shed, or repairing another trellis, or planting a ground cover over a bare spot. Gardens, of course, are a labor of love, and love—and its labor—is never-ending.

“It is gorgeous, Lizzy,” Verna agreed. Even she (by nature a wary, critical person who always saw the flaws in a thing while everybody else was still admiring it) had to admit that the Dahlias were well on the way to restoring Mrs. Blackstone’s garden to its former glory. And the only money they had spent on the project was the fifty cents they gave Old Zeke to cut the grass and trim along the flower beds every other week.

Which had been a very good thing (as Verna, the club’s treasurer, knew very well), because when the Dahlias inherited the house, they were nearly broke. Mrs. Blackstone had left them enough to pay the property taxes for several years, relieving some of Verna’s worry. But there was barely enough in the club kitty to keep the lights on, let alone fix the leaks in the roof and replace the plumbing in the bathroom.

And then, glory be and hallelujah! When they dug the holes to plant their Darling Dahlias sign in front of their new clubhouse, the Dahlias had struck silver. That is, they had uncovered the chest of sterling flatware that Mrs. Blackstone’s mother (a Cartwright) had buried to keep it from falling into the greedy hands of pillaging Yankees as they stormed through Alabama near the end of the War Between the States. When the Dahlias began to look through the chest, they found, in addition to the sterling, a bracelet set with an old-fashioned square-cut emerald, a pair of pearl teardrop earrings, a diamond ring, and a velvet bag containing ten gold coins: twenty-dollar double eagles, still as perfect as the day they were new-minted.