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About Mrs. Whaley And Her Charleston Garden
Product Description In conversation with William Baldwin. Emily Whaley's garden on Church Street in Charleston, South Carolina, may be the most visited private garden in the country. And no wonder. It is the life's work of a vibrant, sociable, opinionated, determined, forceful woman who has spent the last eighty-five years cultivating whatever life offered her. MRS. WHALEY AND HER CHARLESTON GARDEN captures and preserves Emily Whaley's distinctive voice and braces us with a clear understanding of how one might cultivate a practical personal philosophy alongside one's garden. "An ageless and captivating visit." --Publishers Weekly; "South Carolina gardener grows into phenom." --USA Today, cover story; "Emily Whaley is wonderful, both in and out of her garden."--Rosemary Verey, author of THE AMERICAN WOMAN'S GARDEN. As seen on CBS Sunday Morning. Now in its 6th printing. From Booklist In the event a visit to coastal South Carolina is not possible, the next best thing is an introduction to Mrs. Whaley by way of William Baldwin's engaging conversation with this grande dame of Charleston's gardening world. Mrs. Whaley, who has reached her eighty-fifth year, is happy to share details of a rich, full life, and her thoughts meander through an extensive range of topics. Baldwin's approach is to let Mrs. Whaley do all the talking, so the narrative is her's alone--and a delightful, rather breathless account it is, incorporating the evolution of her own renowned garden with reminiscences of childhood and a personal history of southern life lived most graciously. Gardens cultivated by other generations of her family feature prominently in Mrs. Whaley's tales, and as she reveals how the gardening tradition fostered her own avid dedication, it is apparent how tending one's plants can enrich the spirit and forge admirable connections with friends and acquaintances. Alice Joyce From Kirkus Reviews A sweet but slight bouquet: a gardening memoir told in a Southern drawl. Whaley, an 85-year-old South Carolina gentlewoman, sits down, as it were, in her Charleston garden to summon up memories of camellias past. Baldwin, a South Carolina architect and novelist (The Fennel Family Papers, 1996, etc.), observes that she ``moves with the imperial bearing of a grand Southern matron. But on the inside she's a knobby-kneed 14-year-old country girl.'' The matron's account of life and gardening can come across as regrettably mild. ``It's an awful lot of fun to live into your eighties,'' she declares. ``It helps to have some money, though.'' Likewise, she remarks, ``People are the greatest--the most fun that life offers.'' But Whaley also delivers some choice comments and vignettes: ``Dad said if everything Nan planted had taken, a rabbit couldn't have run across the yard.'' And she can be folksily tart: ``You have a muscle here between your ears. When you play tennis, when you do exercises, you use muscles. The muscle up top is the same. Unless it's used it is going to be flabby.'' Whaley devotes chapters to her rural childhood, her parents, and her lawyer husband; she also offers her thoughts on her dog, on self-esteem, and on her favorite recipes. Discussions of her Charleston garden, measuring 30 by 110 feet, takes up about a third of the book, and though her description of it is charming, one doesn't walk away with a convincing sense of place. Her gardening advice is pretty basic: ``DO water your plants in the morning so that the leaves are dry by nightfall. You'll have less trouble with fungal diseases.'' And too many of the non-gardening vignettes seem slender, unrevealing. It would have been better to drench those portions with details, which count for as much in life stories as they do in gardens. (illustrations, not seen) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. Review "An ageless and captivating visit...a world full of sunlight." -- Publisher's Weekly "Passionate, endlessly quotable opinions on gardening and
