They came to an old clearing, with its log cabin long since a mere heap of brown mold under a wild tangle of raspberry vines, but with a neglected plot of flowers growing beside the worn stone slab that had been the doorstep of this primitive home – a vernal monument to some pioneer mistress long since forgotten and lost from the dusty records of mankind, but still remembered for her love of beauty by her lilies in this quiet, remote place.
~Col. Harold P. Sheldon, Tranquility, 1936
Tipper
Appalachia Through My Eyes – A series of photographs from my life in Southern Appalachia.
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It always gives me a kind of wistful feeling – part pleasure and part sadness – to come across a patch of daylilies in what remains of a clearing in the woods.
You don’t know how much I wish I was close enough and healthy enough to come to listen to the Pressley Girls. I’d be there every time they opened their mouths to sing or cracked their knuckles to play. That includes you and Paul too. Paul is their accompaniment and you are their bass as well as their base.
Thank God for the internet! And Thank You for being you!
Tipper,
I bet Don Casada has seen more Easter Lillies than you can imagine. He use to send me pictures of old homeplaces where he Bushwacked in the Smokies. I forwarded them on to my Girls and they appreciated them.
I’ve been looking forward to Martin’s Creek Singing by the Pressley Girls and Pap’s Wilson Bunch. …Ken
I have two peonies my husband rescued from an old home site. I have had them for over 30 yrs. I often wonder about their original owner. They came up too early this year & we cover them every time the temperature dips. I would be heartbroken to lose them.
We grew up calling daffodils “Easter lilies”. One of my Mom’s favorite things to do in spring was to roam the backroads through the Daniel Boone National Forest and find flowers to transplant. Strangely enough, I do not recall us having any daylilies. Those places, and even the plants themselves, undoubtedly had a unique history. But about all we could do was be grateful they started a living beauty that endures.
I have often seen the old “orange” daylillies where an old family home once stood. With so many cultivars available now, I am having a difficult time trying to find some of these to put in my gardens. There are so many plants which, like certain foods and recipes, always bring up a memory of a certain family member long gone or a certain location now being hidden by “progress”.
Tipper–I’ve got to wonder how in the world you came across this quotation from Hal Sheldon. He’s one of my favorite outdoor writers (and I’ve written on him in turn), thanks in large measure to his trilogy of Tranquility stories. Incidentally, Tranquility was a real place, not just a figment of his fertile imagination. While I love his work it’s so far removed from the mainstream of your reading, being set mostly in New England, that this surprised and delighted me.
Jim Casada
Jim-If I’m remembering right Don sent me the quote a few years back 🙂
In the mountains you always find lilies growing at the old home places, even long after the structures are all gone. Anyone who has ever hiked the mountains knows that!
It’s a beautiful statement, don’t you think?
You see this a lot, cultivated flowers in the middle of a field or along a roadside. I always wonder how they came to grow in that spot