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picture by : Clay Langdon .
The first time Mary Cooper arrive to my house for dinner , she brought homemade cream Malva sylvestris — in a French jam jar , covered with cheesecloth — and an armload of the most beautiful camellias I had ever control . There were divine pink - and - blank ‘ Pink Perfection , ' curly dark cerise ‘ Professor Charles S. Sargent , ' curly pink ‘ deb , ' ‘ White Empress , ' gorgeous , cuticle - like ‘ White By the Gate , ' and ruffly pink ‘ Carter ’s Sunburst . ' We float them in soup plates and smashed them into wine rinsers and water pitchers ( ‘ Carter ’s Sunburst ’ has fabulous long stem ) until my tiny dining room was an blowup of candlelit bolshie and whitened and pink . At that minute I make up one’s mind I absolutely adored Mary Cooper .
But then I saw her garden , and I really fall in erotic love .
The camellias are there , of course of instruction . And navel and sweet orange tree , two kumquats , a Meyer lemon , and two satsuma . ( “ Because of the freezes , citrus is kind of a risky business in New Orleans , ” she says , “ but it ’s the one thing I ’ll take a hazard on . ” ) There is a persimmon and a melon tree and a pear and a pomegranate tree and a fence breed entirely by nasturtiums . There is common jasmine and Arabian jasmine ‘ Grand Duke of Tuscany ’ and an unusual white-livered nighttime - blooming jasmine ( “ It ’s a mutant or something — I found it in a supporter ’s moo-cow pasture ” ) . Against one rampart of her theater are honest-to-goodness roses named ‘ Prosperity ’ and ‘ Maggie , ' and outside her kitchen door is the bush Kashmir bouquet , Clerodendrum chinense‘Pleniflorum ’ ( “ the good kind , ” she says , the kind that is hardly pinkish and sweet smell rather than purple and “ stinky ” ) . And then there are what she calls the “ shockers ” : the gingers ; the raspberry of promised land ; the lycoris , or wanderer lilies , crimson and amber blooming that seem to “ come out of nowhere ” on a long , leafless stem . “ They are so snazzy , ” she says . “ I just make out them . ”
All this border an 1880s house that was moved in 1908 to an idyllic spot across from the Mississippi River in a division of New Orleans get laid as Bywater . The house , with its wide plank story and tall , tall ceilings and rooms painted Paris green , is fantastic , but Cooper purchase it , she says , for the lot . Her early yards had been “ teeny patch of dope ” she could “ almost cut by hand . ” So when she saw the deep backyard and long side pace of her current house , she knew she could make a '' piffling Eden . ” And it is .
When I visit , the three CT ( whose own catwalk up to the back porch has been almost totally take over by plumbago ) sprawling under the table in Cooper ’s dining room , where she is caning the seat of a Regency electric chair . She saw a adult female in California doing the same matter years ago , somehow picked up the art , and now does it for a sustenance . While she mould , I crunch on sugar cookies scented with maize and new rosemary from her backyard and hear to her tell me about the first plant life she put in the ground , 15 years ago .
They were crape myrtles she buy cheap , in a blind buy , and she was determined to get them , with their huge tooth root balls , into the dry land . “ It was raining and freezing cold , and the house was practically falling down , ” she says . But she stuck it out , digging hole after pickle in her bare grounds . Just when she was about to give up , she says a man passed by in his car , rolled down the window , and said , '' You do n’t know me , but I conceive what you ’re doing is wonderful . '' And I thought , OK , I can go on . ” Better yet , all the bushes turned out to be the same shade of Citrullus vulgaris pink . spur by that first victory , she correct about plotting the rest of her garden , with a certain “ wildness ” as her goal : “ I like the musical theme of not having a garden that was thoroughgoing . ”
She also wanted to use plants significant to the area . She hasPhlox divaricata‘Louisiana ’ and Louisiana iris , and ball of indigotin and sugarcane , the state ’s first two agricultural crops . “ The common fig tree trees , ” she pronounce , “ come with the Italians in the mid-19th century , ” and the branches of the sago decoration , which are not palms at all but descendants of pines and other strobilus - bearing Tree , have always been used in the local Catholic church service ’ Palm Sunday service . Cooper plant giant reed alongside her cistern ( which houses goldfish ) because a friend said her grandmother had done the same . Another friend tell her that nun brought Rangoon creeper ( Quisqualis indica ) over from Cuba , so she imbed it in front . Artemisia absinthium , or wormwood , is what absinthe is made of ; and vetiver , Cooper ’s favorite flora , is said to repel that New Orleans scourge , termites .
As a gardener , she is virtual : “ I ’m not into breast feeding anything along . It ’s just get to get in the background and survive . ” But she can be lyrical when lecture about her plant . The dark - blooming cereus , for example , “ looks like a ballet skirt when it opens . I can see why champagne is the only thing to drink while watching . ” ( Waiting for it to unfold is a famous New Orleans pursuit . ) The bloom of the pomegranate tree look like “ promising - orange tissue paper that has been crinkle , ” and the night - flower jasmine “ smells like cake frost . ” She have it away the name of her Japanese varnish tree , Firmiana simplex , because “ it sounds like poetry . ”
Her enthusiasm is contagious . I moon around over a cryptic shrub with lavender efflorescence , and she gushes that “ it looks like Haiti . ” When I admire something else , she pass me a cutting . “ What is it ? ” I postulate . “ I do n’t know . But seem at the bud . Are n’t they cool ? They await like hiss . ”
