When I'm in the garden, time seems to stand still. Nothing else matters except that visceral connection I feel to Elizabeth and her world. I take time to really study the garden. I get down on the ground to appreciate a new perspective. I hold a bruised leaf to my nose to see if I can discern any fragrance. I weed an area—always carefully—searching for freshly uncovered bulbs emerging from dormancy. I have found SO much in this garden. Countless discoveries have come above the ground, but equally as many beneath the soil...

This past Saturday afternoon, I tackled a project with April Ryan (see my 12/11/12 post). For a garden curator of an historic property, it's important to see the garden as much as possible through the eyes of its original creator. In order to do that, the original design must be restored where time, plants or new ownership has changed it—purposefully or not.

I hope you will all help spread the word about this opportunity for Wing Haven—our latest "power2give" project, "the Love, History and Science of a Garden".

We are in need of funding for archive materials to properly preserve and house all of the fantastic items we're so fortunate to have in Elizabeth Lawrence's house.

It's hard to believe that only one week ago, we were in the clutches of a snow storm here in Charlotte, North Carolina. Today, I've opened all the windows in Elizabeth Lawrence's house, and the sweet songs of birds have replaced the dull droning of the heating system. Out in the garden, it's 75℉, daffodils are popping up all over, …

Sometimes it is harder to make changes in a garden than one would like. It was certainly difficult to make the final decision to take down the once-magnificent witch hazel, Hamamelis x intermedia 'Jelena', in front of Elizabeth Lawrence's house. Dealing with terminally ill plants is inevitable in gardening, especially in a garden with so many mature specimens.

"...it is said that a toad is worth twenty dollars a year, and I suppose a frog helps, too. In my garden there are more frogs than toads, as we have a pool, and their evening chorus is such a din I have been expecting the neighbors to complain, but all I have heard them say is they like it."

Elizabeth Lawrence
Charlotte Observer
February 5, 1961

"Walking down the garden path on a sultry afternoon in late July, I met a fragrance that took some time to trace. It was the mountain summersweet, Clethra acuminata, a delicate, elusive perfume that comes and goes with the breeze."

Elizabeth Lawrence, the Charlotte Observer, November 30, 1969

"Sometimes an unseasonable season - one that is exceedingly wet or dry, a summer of record heat, or a winter milder than usual - brings about the flowering of a plant that has been existing in the garden for quite a while without finding the right conditions for blooming."

Elizabeth Lawrence, The Little Bulbs

And so it is in Elizabeth Lawrence's garden even today. It has been a little over two and a half years since I started tending this awesome plot, and I am still amazed and delightfully surprised—on a nearly daily basis—by "new" blooming plants.

So at long last, I am finally making the time to sit, chill with nature, and write another post. How amazingly busy (in a good way) it has been here in Elizabeth Lawrence’s garden! I have kept my schedule so filled with reorganizing garden areas, research, our incredible volunteer group (the Keepers of the Garden), and several fantastic workshops, I’ve left myself no time to fill you all in on the garden goings-on. And there has been a whole lot going on!

"The special charm of a Southern spring is its earliness; it is as long drawn out as it is sweet."

Elizabeth Lawrence, A Southern Garden

What a winter it was in Elizabeth Lawrence’s garden! ( I say with great optimism.) Temperatures were generally colder for much longer than I remember in recent years. Although the extended winter chill set blooms back anywhere from two weeks to a month, with the recent prolonged spring warmth, flowers are popping out absolutely everywhere!

Happy winter greetings! I am thrilled to be Wing Haven’s new Lawrence Garden Associate. Having been acquainted with this garden for many years, I never truly took the time to visit with it as I do now. This is a most intimate garden. I am humbled by the mastery and success of the garden's design.

On July 27th, I posted about Elizabeth Lawrence's experience with buckeye seed from June of 1962. Her luck almost 50 years ago did not produce much by way of seed, thanks to little critters, but this year luck has been on our side!

"In midsummer, when heat and drought have drained all color from leaf and blossom - in spite of all of the city water that is poured on them - the surprise lily rises mysteriously from the ground. One day there is nothing, and the next there is a tall, pale stem…

"The dwarf bottlebrush buckeye, Aesculus parviflora, is not really small flowered. The specific name applies only to the individual flowers. The inflorescence is an impressive slender spike, like a foxtail lily, from twelve to sixteen inches long, with apricot-tipped stamens standing out beyond the white flowers. …

“[Cyclamen] neapolitanum is a fall-flowering species, but I have had bloom as early as the Fourth of July. Last year the first flower came at the end of August, and buds continued to appear until early December, in spite of a series of hard frosts that put an end to all other flowers except Chinese violets.

"In early summer southern gardens come into a glory that has come to them only in recent years with the development of the day-lily. It is seldom that the perennial of the day proves the perennial of all others for the South, but this is one that thrives in all climates. …

"I cannot think why the yuccas are so little used. Once in midwinter I went into a little garden that had no claim to distinction in any season, but acquired the charm of simplicity when it was reduced by frost to a pattern of brick-edged walks accented by stiff rosettes of yuccas and framed by a clipped hedge." …

I thought a quick picture of the garden through Miss Lawrence's study today would be of interest. I often wonder how many hours Elizabeth spent sitting in front of this window watching and writing. The garden view has changed since I started the fellowship, mainly that the cherry laurel allee has been removed and started over, and the stone walls refurbished.

While carrying branches from Lawrence's Chaenomeles 'Apple Blossom' that I've been pruning this week since it's finished flowering, I noticed another quince at the curb shedding its bark.

"Last summer I never saw my toad - or toads. I have never been sure whether it is the same or several. He usually startles me hopping out from under a plant when I am weeding the border, and I think he lives in the rock wall. If toads are really so valuable I think something should be done to attract them, but I have never known what they like."