Emily Whaley - Mrs. Whaley and Her Charleston Garden

Emily Whaley
IN CONVERSATION WITH
WILLIAM BALDWIN

ILLUSTRATIONS BY
CHARLES DEANTONIO

Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

To all the present and future gardeners in my family

INSERTING MYSELF LIKE THIS BETWEEN THE READER AND EMILY WHALEY IS A BIT like stepping in front of a speeding automobile. Emilys tan Volvo station wagon to be exact. Yes, she is definitely a high-energy person. As youll soon discover, shes got an opinion on everything. Not just gardening. Everything. And she has not just the courage of her convictions but the wit and boundless enthusiasm to back them up. Let me put it another way. On the outside Emily Whaley is eighty-five years old and moves with the imperial bearing of a grand Southern matron. But on the inside shes a knobby-kneed fourteen-year-old country girl bouncing across a homemade tennis court.

Charleston, South Carolina, where she lives, is a city of gardens and gardeners. When you drive over the high camel hump of the Cooper River bridge (which she likes to do for fun), you look down on red tin roofs and amazing expanses of greenery. Each fall the city hosts a garden festival and each spring even more visitors return to enjoy Southern gardens at their best. And every year two or three thousand of these visitors pass through Emilys Church Street garden. She and the garden are already well known. The New York Times sends reporters to interview her. Southern Accents did a layout. Practically everyone in Charleston knows of Mrs. Emily Whaley. But even they may be in for a few surprises.

And Emily does love surprises.

Before meeting her for the first time I visited the garden. That was in October. A light rain was falling. I passed through the gate and the sounds of the city were suddenly muffled. The thick foliage of the entry glistened. I turned a corner and on all sides were what I noted at the time as visual games. Flowers and shrubs and statuary and seashells and brick and wood and blue sky and water all played off of each other as they competed in turn for my attention. Strong narrative, I wrote in my notebook. A storyteller. I didnt know the half of it, for as youre about to see, Emily is a storyteller of the highest order. In the garden, a ramble along the paths brought the aside of vignettes, the dramatic delivery of focal points, and a final secret unveiled. And in her tales I would find the samea seemingly leisurely delivery would lull me into a complacent enjoyment and then suddenly Id be faced with a moral. Emily is not just a poet and a gardener. I suspect she would have made a good trial lawyer.

So here I present to you Emily Whaley and her stories. Stories about gardens. Stories about how to gardenand how to serve a meal and teach somebody to dance. Theres a chapter on each of her parents and one on Charleston preservation and tourism and another on a Russian spy. This is a real book. A real how-to guide for lifethe kind of simple and exciting life where giving and taking are mixed up together and joy and laughter are just a turn in the path away.

Wait. Before closing I should say its impossible not to fall in love with Emily. But I must admit to you that I never felt quite comfortable enough to call her Cheeka, as she insists you must. Shes still Emily to me. And I was one of those rare ones she couldnt teach to dance. But she fed me welllunches just like my own Pinopolis-raised grandmother used to fix. And she did her level best to explain gardening and she treated me royally. And yes, what follows is thoroughly hers. My job here has consisted of transcribing, retyping, and pruningshes a strong advocate of pruning. Anyway, this is Emily Whaleywarm, funny, earthy, and oh, so opinionated. She changed my life for the better. Let her do the same for you.

I WAS BORN WITH A TRAIT I WOULDNT GIVE UP FOR A MILLION DOLLARS. ENTHUsiasm. And I also have what the French call joie de vivre. As my middle daughter, Anne, says, My God, Cheeka, you have an opinion on everything. I think they get fed up with my opinions, but where can you go in life without opinions?

Cheeka is what my family and friends call me. My father named me that. He held me up for my mothers inspection after I was born and said, Nancy, looks like we have a cheweek here. A cheweek is a waterbird a bit bigger than a sandpiper which we had around home. When my sister was born, he held her up and said, This ones a peach. She was called Peach, which is far easier on you than being named for a waterbird. But Ive been called Cheeka for more than eighty years, which is probably for the best. My real name is Emily, but my oldest daughter is Miss Em and I had an Aunt Em and now I have a granddaughter Emily. There are plenty of Emilys around.

I live in Charleston, South Carolina, on Church Street. My house dates from before the Revolutionary War and was owned by a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Theres a plaque on the wall saying all that, so I wont add more. My husband, Ben Scott Whaley, and I moved here in 1938. The house is comfortable. Its one room wide but doesnt have the big piazzas the way the later single houses do.

Charleston. I assume everybody and their baby knows about Charleston. The Civil War started in the citys harbor, which is only a block over from our house. You wont hear about that from me, though. You wont hear about Church Street, either. If you know Charleston then you know Church Street. Its the oldest part of the city. Cabbage Row is just up the block. Cabbage Row was the Catfish Row of DuBose Heyward and George Gershwins Porgy and Bess. The watercolorist Alice Smith had a studio a few doors away. Across the street is a Baptist church designed by Robert Mills, who was Americas first architect. This is an ancient and colorful corner of the city, but Im confessing to you now that most of the history youll get from me is the family kind.

My friend Sally took me along with her once to give a garden lecture. I was just a warm body up there on the stage, but I thought I could handle it. When Sally finished speaking she asked for questions and the first one was What year was the azalea introduced to Charleston? I couldnt have answered that to save my blessed soul. I thought theyd be asking, How do you grow an azalea? Or, How do you keep a cat out of your garden?

So thats what Ill be attempting here. Not that I actually know how to keep a cat out of the garden, but gardening and gardens are central to this memoir. I have a garden thats pretty well known. Its small, only thirty feet wide and tucked away in my backyard, but a great many visitors come, especially in the spring. Also, Im going to say something about my parents and growing up in a little village to the north of the city. And Ill be giving out a few of those so numerous opinions, for whats the good of having an opinion if you dont share it with your friends and your wonderful daughters?

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