Aunt Francis's Garden. Yell County, Arkansas.

It’s gardening season here in Arkansas, and both my daily life and research seem to be circling things in bloom. The tomatoes are ripe; the pole beans are taller than me, and the peppers are plentiful. I love coming home from running errands to find squash, zucchini, snow and purple hull peas on my front porch left by anonymous kind friends who plant for a purposeful surplus. I enjoy the few calm moments I  spend in my own garden picking herbs or engaging in that necessary yet futile feeling task of weeding. And then there are the flowers. The magical, beautiful flowers. But I’ll get to them in a minute.

Here are just a few ramblings and ruminations on fieldwork, garden work, grief work, and dreams for the garden I plan to someday create.

Food

Raised beds of beans. Photo by Bryan Moats.

Within the vast field of cultural studies garden topics are becoming increasingly popular. Wholistic food education in particular is gaining national attention, and famous folks like Jamie Oliver, for example, are working hard to get kids interested in the food they eat. School garden projects are popping up everywhere, and it’s all just so inspiring. Recently fellow Arkansas folklorist Rachel Reynolds-Luster worked with teachers, students, and community members to create a Edible Schoolyard-inspired school garden in her home in Couch, Missouri. From what I hear, the upcoming issue of CARTS will feature stories about school and community gardens.   I can’t even begin to touch on the depth of all these wonderful goings on that fall under the community gardening and food topic. But I have inculded a a few links at the bottom of this page if you want to learn more. If you have a suggestion for a link I have not included please let me know.

Flowers

California Giant zineas next to the Greasy Grits beans.

I love flower gardening.  So did my mother. When she came to visit us in Kentucky in 2007 we took her to a local butterfly habitat and she was amazed and full of laughter, watching all those butterflies as they landed on our clothing. One of my future goals is to create a memorial butterfly/bee garden in honor of my mother and many others who have lost their lives to cancer in the Yell County area (and that’s a lot of people, folks). In my dream the garden will be on site at the McElroy House, in the same spot my grandfather once kept his flower garden. In fact, discovering some of his iris in the tangled weeds near his house first led me to think about the McElroy House as a concept.  This memorial garden will be right beside the center’s veggie garden, for which I also have big plans (If you want to know more about the goals for the McElroy House: Center for Regional Folklore and Oral History go here).

When I first started thinking about the butterfly and bee garden I spent some time reading articles and how-to books on the subject. The pictures were beautiful, and the articles somewhat helpful, but what has really helps me conceptualize future plans for the garden is experimenting with my own.  Everything I do outside these days seems to be garden practice. I’ve learned to pay attention to what leaf and flowers shapes work well together,  which plants seem to encourage one anther’s growth and which ones seem to stall when placed too close. I observe how the colors complement each other or drown each other out. Mistakes make the best teachers.  I’ve recently learned that bachelor’s button simply will not transplant, daisies have to be routinely deadheaded or cut to retain their beauty, and – just as the little tag said – blanket flowers really can’t take wet soil. Having learned these lessons from observation I won’t soon forget them. I also try not to over-think things and strike a balance between informed decisions and random accidents. I believe a good flower garden is a bit reckless looking.

I’m rather new to flower gardening, and I have so many lessons yet to learn. This experimental garden I am creating in the front yard is only my second. The first real flower garden was the small flower-lined walk we had in Bowling Green, KY. It started out as a kind of afterthought, but I soon became obsessed with waiting for things to bloom. I can remember walking our walkway in the mornings, barefoot, coffee in hand, to examine each plant’s daily changes.

Bryan in our first flower garden in Kentucky.

I started the garden for two reasons. When we came back to Arkansas we moved across the street from my parents. My mother was dying of cancer, and I knew she  was going to be spending a lot of time on the couch. She loved flower gardens, had a passion for the color red, and admired hummingbirds and butterflies. When she looked out her living room window every morning I wanted her to see nothing but color, motion, and life.

Arkansas Garden in June of 2010.

The second reason was purely selfish. I needed the life it would bring. Caregiving is terribly difficult.  Helping someone face their final days leaves the caregiver craving any semblance of growth and renewal. Moments when my mother was resting, and I felt overcome by the weight of knowing I was losing her – and there was nothing I or anyone else could do to keep her here – I would cross the street to my front yard and just start digging.

Two years later I am still digging, and I’ve managed to dig up a rather large portion of the front yard. My end goal (with this house or wherever we wind up making our home) is to leave nothing but a few walking patches through the grass. Just enough to get the reel mower through. The rest of the yard will be covered in wild, crazy, colorful flowers. I imagine myself walking through my flower-filled yard remembering my mother and calling out the different flower names to my playful boys. In talking to others who have lost loved ones, I have discovered that the urge to plant a garden during illness or after loss is quite common. Every time I see a flower garden I wonder which of their plants have ties to people they have lost. Maybe that makes me morbid, I think more likely it’s just part of the mental landscape of anyone whose lost someone very close to them.

Close up of garden.

A few days before my mother died she asked me to push her wheelchair to the front door so she could look at the flowers. It was October, but the zinnias were still fuschia and pink, tall and bright; the orange, red-trimmed marigolds had grown round and heavy with blooms, and the deep purple morning glories wound around the bamboo poles and front porch columns, reaching all the way to the roof. I pushed her to door and she stared out through the glass for a few moments, said something about the flowers looking pretty, and then asked me to help her lay down again. It turned out to be the last time she got out of bed. Almost two years after her death I still think of that moment almost daily.

After she died I found out that gardening was actually nothing new to me as I had originally supposed. According to my mother’s detailed daily planners, which I began reading after her death, she gardened often when she was pregnant with me. Her jotted down notes reveal which flowers were planted on which days. A few marigolds put in the ground on Monday, a hibiscus on Tuesday, cannas on Wednesday. Coming across these notes brought back forgotten memories of helping her tend to the flowers, deadheading the petunias and marigolds she always kept on the front porch. In fact, her hydrangeas, hibiscus, and liliacs still bloom each year, reminding me that some things we put in the ground will outlive us by decades.

So until I can create the McElroy House garden I work in my own. I watch which flowers bring in the bees, the butterflies, the hummingbirds. I try different varieties; I save seeds; I talk to farmers and gardeners; I try different plants in different places and combinations. And as a folklorist, I pay attention to how plants have a way of connecting us to other people.

Research: The Garden and the Gardener

Surprise squash in the compost pile.

Recently myself and Utah folklorist-extraordinaire, Nelda Ault, began working on some garden research, looking at how home gardens differ between central and northwest Arkansas and her native Utah. Both of us are interested in the realm of folklore and education, and one of our goals with this fieldwork is to look at the garden through the eyes of its caretaker. How did the garden come to be? How did the gardener learn to garden? Why do they keep doing it year after year? These are the kind of questions we’ll be asking.

We’re both very interested in how regional traditions can help connect youth with older members of their communities and vice versa. Learning more about both the passion and practicality that gardeners bring to their creations hold such promise for community youth education projects. We will be presenting our research at the 2010 American Folklore Society Conference held in Nashville, Tennesse.

People

Site of McElroy home place. Cotton Town, Yell County, Arkansas

As a child my mother often took me to the sight of her father’s old home place, pointing out the tree near where her grandparents— Rostus and Ivy McElory— built their home in what used to be the  Cardon Bottoms community. Last year when visiting the site with my cousins I dug up some wild yarrow and brought it back home to my garden.  It took root and began blooming this year. I often wonder if that same yarrow was growing when my grandfather was young.

I placed the yarrow right next to the lilies I had recently bought from a woman in Dardanelle who was having a plant sale to scale back her large garden. Her husband was ill, and she was his primary caretaker. We talked about flowers and care giving as I made my purchases, which also included orange dayliless that remind me of my good friend Tonya Taylor. The lilies are next to the marigolds I’ve been growing from saved seeds my mother gave me the year I moved back to Arkansas.

A garden is naturally filled with the flowers of interesting people, and I’ve worked hard to make it so. After my mother died and I tried to figure out what to do with my hands now that my caregiving duties were over, I emailed friends requesting they tell me their favorite flowers so I could purposefully plant them along side the ones I stumble onto. There are Texas bluebells from Mo, Coral Bells for Kristen, Tulips for Wendy, roses for Rebekah, and the daylillies for Tonya, as I mentioned above.  There is a Gardenia Heather helped me plant; a Peony from Marcia, and the tulips from Kristin, all presents I received for my birthday, an event Rachel helped to make happen . Many of the flowers come from plants  people dug up from their own yards, leaving them on my front porch for me to find and transplant. I have zinnia seeds my mother gave me the first year I moved back; mums from the woman who used to live in my grandparents house, plants given to us for my mother’s funeral. There are dogwood trees on the garden’s outskirts sent from fellow folklore graduate students in honor of my mother.

Dogwood tree sent in honor of my mother

I’ll keep going. There is a thrift plant from my cousin and sorrel  from my grandparents home. There are hollyhocks from Nelda. There is a butterfly bush, which we purchased per the suggestion of the honey vendor at the Pope County Farmers Market when we asked him what we could do to help combat the decreasing bee population.  And I have hundreds of daisies, Mom’s favorite flower, all planted from seed after she died.

Gardening is such an exercise in storytelling.  It’s about listening, observing, putting down (sometimes pulling up) roots. All those plants I water every morning  have a story and a larger community of people connected to them.  Sure, I’ve pushed my hand to make my garden especially story-populated, but talk to pretty much any flower gardener, and they’ll have similar tales of their plants origins .  In a sense the plants are tradition bearers in their own right. They tell their own story and help to tell ours as well.

Daisies for Mom

The analogies are endless and spill over one another. It would be easy to perhaps over analyze how the garden and folklore research are alike. But I am reminded of what poet besmilr brigham’s daughter, Heloise Wilson, told me once during an interview about her mother’s work. She recalled how she and her and mother and father once spent an afternoon discussing John Galsworthy’s story “Justice.” Her memories of that discussion have stuck with me and come to mind today:

And with anything, [we discussed] how did the writer give a certain sense of the story      to the reader? What did they do to achieve that? trying to take things apart and        analyze them and not kill it.  Be careful you don’t kill it in the process. Keep a little  distance there.

So I think it will suffice to say that what amazes me most about gardening is that in the peace and quiet of working the soil— whether I’m working to grow food or just create beauty—I am lost in thoughts about the human experience with all it’s struggles and grace.  When I first started gardening I set out to grow flowers. But I wound up listening to stories.

If you want to know more about the backstory on the Center continue reading. If you want to skip to the proposed plans for the McElroy House scroll down.

For a long time it has been a dream of mine to do something like this. My time in graduate school, and especially my time spent working with Michael Morrow and the West Kentucky African American Heritage Center as well as the Kentucky Remembers! Project, shaped my ideas and further pushed me toward this dream (If you want to know more about these projects please visit my portfolio. Their work is amazing, and I highly recommend checking it out). Through their example I saw how oral history and folklife research projects have the capacity to encourage dialog; I witnessed firsthand how youth oral history projects can truly build bridges between generations and members of a community.

I recently inherited my grandparents’ home, the small 1940s house I practically grew up in. It is located one street from my hometown’s historic Front Street. With its proximity to the Arkansas River and the historic district, the location for a folklife center is ideal. Wanting to honor my wonderful grandparents and uncle who once lived there, and my amazing mother who left me the house, I can think of nothing more appropriate then to dedicate the house to researching, and teaching others to research, the history and the folkways of the region they all loved so much. My grandparents’ last name, and my mother’s maiden name and uncle’s name, was McElroy, hence the name of the Center: The McElroy House: Center for Regional Oral History and Folklife Research.

The house is located in a residential area, which means the first step in the process is to apply for a special use permit to open a non-profit in the neighborhood. I have applied for the permit, and the the hearing will be held August 24th at 7:00 pm at Dardanelle City Hall. I will give a presentation detailing my proposed plans and will answer any questions the City Planning Commission and citizens of the community may have. The hearing is open to the public. If you are in the area already or happen to be passing through, I would love for you to come to the meeting and bring any questions, concerns, and/or suggestions you might have. If you are interested in the Center’s work, I would especially love for you to come by. On a lighter note, please be advised that I am having twins—they are due sometime between August 25th (the day after the meeting) and September 15th— so I may be quite a spectacle to behold by the time the meeting rolls around. haha!

It is possible that the City Planning Commission may deny my request for a special use permit. Should this occur, I won’t give up on the dream. I will just regroup and begin looking for a more suitable location.

Below are the proposed plans for the McElroy House. I welcome any comments and/or suggestions.
If you are interested in learning more or would like to support our work, please contact me. We greatly need volunteers who are willing to give time and lots of elbow grease (as my mom used to say) to our efforts–especially people who like garden work. If you are interested in helping out in any way, please let me know!

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McElroy House: Center for Local Oral History Research and Folklife Research.

What I plan to do with the property should the special use permit be granted:

• The Center will focus on the documentation of local history and living traditions. It will be named in honor of my grandparents, Lloyd and Golda Taylor McElroy, and uncle, Bobby McElroy. As noted above, the Center will be called The McElroy House: Center for Regional Oral History and Folklife Research.

• Our main goals will be educational in nature and include cross-generational outreach programs between our community’s young people and elders. We will teach young people how to document oral history and living community traditions and preserve this information for decades to come.

• I will write grants to fund this work and partner with state and national historical agencies to make these things happen. I will work toward becoming a non-profit organization. What follows are some of the services we plan to offer.

A Few Specific Examples of What the Center Will Do:

• We will offer audio and video recording equipment and classes to teach interested community members and youth in our public schools how to use this equipment so they can interview their relatives or friends about their life history and the history of their community. Recording equipment will be available for checkout for events such as family reunions, city gatherings and the like.

• We will have scanners on hand so that community members can bring their old photos to the Center to be scanned into the computer allowing these invaluable photos to be saved for generations to come. We will offer “Photo Sharing Days,” wherein community members can get together to share and discuss their historic photos pertaining to our community.

• All these interviews and photos will be housed in the Center in our database so that they will be available for others to view and hear. A few topics we have already began researching are the cotton industry and its history in the community and the tradition of Decoration Days throughout Yell County. We plan to add many more topics to this list.

• We will partner with local schools, after school programs, and state historical societies to accomplish this work. While we will not be a museum or archival institution, we will work closely with other agencies throughout the state and region that can appropriately house historic documents and artifacts people may wish to denote.

• The small garden space that my grandfather once used to grow tomatoes and peppers will be converted back into a small vegetable garden where we will grow local foods. We will offer workshops, led by community members, on how to grow vegetables, save seeds, and can for the winter. Our goals for the garden will be to preserve and pass on these important gardening skills for generations to come. Any food produced in the garden will be donated to the community.

• A small memorial butterfly garden will be created and named after my mother, former City Clerk, Mary Sue Martin. She was the daughter of Lloyd and Golda McElroy who once owned the house. It will be called the Mary Sue Martin Cancer Memorial Butterfly Garden. Both my grandmother and mother loved butterflies. The garden will bear my mother’s name, but will also serve to honor the many people in our community who pass away from cancer each year. Before cancer took her life, my mother expressed her desire to use her life to help cancer patients in our community. I hope the creation of this garden will be just the first step in raising awareness regarding cancer in our community. Community members will be invited to add plants to the garden in honor of their relatives who passed away from this horrible disease.

This is just a small outline of some of our plans. At the core of our work is a desire to document and preserve the countless living traditions in our community and learn more about our local history. We want to help build bridges between the old and young and help young people know more about their community’s past and present while also looking toward the future.

SO—

I am beginning some research on the folkways of Mother’s Day and Decoration Day here in Yell County. I am going to possibly put together a radio piece about traditions in this area. I hope the research will continue past the radio project as a part of my general research here in Yell County. In general terms, I am curious who celebrates these holidays, how they celebrate them, and why.

Do you or anyone in your family celebrate Decoration Day? You may not do it yourself but perhaps know that your grandmas do. Or maybe you have some far off memory of Decoration Days past. Basically it’s when members of the community go and decorate all the family graves within cemetery. Each cemetery has a different Decoration Day and many families attend different Decoration Days throughout the month of May. Back when I was a kid many people used to spend the whole afternoon at the cemetery visiting with one another after decorating the graves. A few cemeteries still do that.

Meshed in with this tradition of decorating the graves is the wearing of corsages on Mother’s Day.Do you or anyone you know take part in the tradition of wearing corsages on Mother’s Day?

If you participate in any of these folkways or know someone in your family who does (regardless of where you live, but especially if you live in the Yell County area), I would really, really love to hear more about it.

Email me at meredithmartin underscore moats at yahoo.

Arkansas Post Office Mural Project

The webpage is currently under construction, but still contains helpful information. I discovered that the Dardanelle post office mural was created by an artist who was originally from Armenia.

This mural plays important role in my life. I can remember my mother pointing out the artwork to me when I was a small child and telling me about my grandparents (her parents) who, just like the people in the mural, had picked cotton in the Cardon Bottoms.

I am currently beginning preparatory work for a radio piece about Dardanelle’s mural and what it means to those who live here. I am in search of personal stories and any deep background information that might be related. If you have any ideas, comments, suggestions, please let me know!

I will be updating this entry as the research continues.

See also:
“Off the Wall: New Deal Post Office Murals” by Patricia Raynorhttp://www.postalmuseum.si.edu/resources/6a2q_postalmurals.html