Radio Interview with John Raab of Suspense Magazine

Here's a link to a recording of a live radio interview I did last Saturday with John Raab at Suspense Magazine. It's about 25 minutes long. Have patience because it takes a moment to load, and then begins with some rather loud music. We talk at first about Who Buries the Dead, then move on to other things.

Spring has finally arrived in New Orleans. I'm afraid I've been playing hooky this week and neglecting poor Sebastian in favor of my garden. It's been glorious.

Serendipity

I just spent the past week immersed in two lovely books: The Morville Year and The Morville Hours, by Katherine Swift. Regular readers of this blog know that the eleventh book in the Sebastian St. Cyr series, Untitled (yeah, the lack of a title starting to bug me), will see Sebastian and Hero and Simon traveling north to Shropshire (for reasons that will become more clear after you've read #10, Who Buries the Dead). One of the characters in the Shropshire book is a woman who lives in a dower house around which she has created a lovely garden. And in one of those marvelous accidents of fate, I was kicking around the Internet one day when I stumbled upon Swift, who has created a lovely garden around a National Trust dower house in Shropshire, and wrote two books about it. So of course I ordered them.

I was hoping they might prove to be useful research tools; what I didn't expect was to be swept away. These are enchanting books, full of all sorts of marvelous details about plants and birds and butterflies and bees, about the cycle of the seasons and folkways and ancient traditions, about life and history and country folk and one woman's intense love for the making of a garden.

You know a book has really touched you when you realize it has caused a shift in your thinking, a change in your outlook. My own garden has been hideously neglected this past year, with all of my weekends going to getting my mother's house ready to sell (closing this Thursday!!!!!!!!!). Neglect a garden in New Orleans and it will swallow your house. I've been feeling so oppressed and anxious about it that my attitude was destroying my joy in my garden (well, that plus New Orleans' brutal summer heat). Thanks to Swift, I've been able to let go that oppressive sense of, Oh, God, I should have cut back my roses by now! and It's almost time for the leaves to start falling again and I never finished picking up last year's! Yes, my garden's a mess. But I'm slowly bringing it back, and thanks to Swift, I find I can relax and enjoy the process of getting it there far more than I would have otherwise. Her gift to me.

Magical books.

Finished....Again

I've finally finished the revisions of Who Buries the Dead requested by my editor. Now on to book #11!

To celebrate, I took the afternoon off and went outside to tackle my winter-killed garden. Fortunately, the weather cooperated, so I had a pleasant afternoon of cutting back roses (I'm late; in New Orleans roses get their heavy pruning in late January-early February) and sighing over dead plants. I could spend the rest of the month working on my garden and still have a million things to do, so I'm going to need to pace myself.

The eastern side of my house is a narrow, fifty foot butterfly garden, and it's almost all dead. Lots of replanting to do!

On another note, tomorrow we take Angel back to the vet to have his kidney levels tested. Wish us luck.

A Rose Named St. Cyr

Last summer, I decided that I could not--positively could not--acquire any more roses; my yard is full, full, full. Except, how could I resist a rose named St. Cyr?

It's a Pierre de St. Cyr, and dates back to 1838. A Bourbon bred by Plantier, it's deliciously fragrant and is said to grow only 3-5 feet high, although roses in New Orleans can often reach heights unheard of in other places (which is why it's still in a pot, while I learn its habits). I snapped these pictures with my phone about a month ago, the first time it bloomed for me;  it's now doubled in size and is covered with blossoms, but it's pouring outside today, so the old photos will have to do.

Of course, since I bought a rose for its name, I couldn't really complain when Steve bought a White Pearl in Red Dragon's Mouth, simply because he was so taken with the name. Which just goes to show that roses, like books, can sell on the bases of their names/titles alone.

A Garden of Roses

One of my passions is old roses. I dream of tearing down my neighbors' houses and filling the resultant empty lots with roses (note to neighbors: it's nothing personal). New Orleans isn't the best place in the world to grow roses, but the warmth that nurtures vulnerable varieties does help make up for the blackspot and balling and the other problems caused by our humidity and heavy rains and hurricanes.

This isn't the most glorious spring I've seen, but spring is always lovely. If I had to pick a favorite rose, it would be this one: Souvenir de la Malmaison. I love the scent, the color, the buds, the open, knotty blooms, the name, the history, the endless blooming, the polite, mannerly growth... I just love this rose.

But this one--Sombreuil, a climber--comes a close second. It climbs up one of the pillars to my gallery, and also splays across the back wall (I didn't mean to buy two; one came disguised as something else, but I didn't really mind).

I also love Prosperity, another climber, entwined with a lemon tree next to the fish pond. It blooms its heart out all year, and smells heavenly. (It also helped pull the fence down in Hurricane Isaac).

And then there's Lamarque, growing up the back pillar to the screened-in gallery (home of Whiskies and Nora).

As you can see, I'm partial to peach, pink, blush, and white; Steve loves red. I let him bring in a few, although I fuss and groan over every one. Space is so precious, and there are so many more roses I'd love to have. At last count, we had seventy, which is ridiculous because we don't have that big of a yard and we have two massive oak trees (hence my coveting of my neighbors' yards). And of course, roses aren't the only things I grow. At the moment, the columbines are lovely...

I could go on and on like this. I love my garden. When I get stuck in the writing of a book, I go outside and work in my garden, or just walk around and breathe. It always helps. I call it garden therapy.

A Mother's Gifts

After one of the coldest winters on record, spring has finally arrived in New Orleans. Trees are bursting into leaf everywhere you look, the birds are chirping happily as they build their nests, and my garden is once again filled with blooms.



Some of the plants I lost to our long, hard freeze were dear to my heart, having been grown from cuttings of plants my mother had grown from cuttings taken years ago from her mother's garden. But there is still so much left.



So why did I name this post "A Mother's Gifts"? Because my love of gardens is one of the many things I inherited from my mother. And because when I moved here to New Orleans from Australia, this Lady Banks rose was one of the first plants my mother gave me...



It's still here, even though she is gone. And whenever I see it, I smile.

Quack!

Steve and I started feeding the birds and squirrels back in those ugly, traumatic days after Katrina, when the hurricane’s winds had stripped the vegetation from the area’s shrubs and trees, and the receding floodwaters had left neighborhood gardens brown and dead. Now, Steve throws out big scoopfuls of seed and nuts and cracked corn every morning before he leaves for work. Our garden is an oasis of birdsong played out against the splash of the fountains (and the occasional “Meow! I want one of those!” from our gang of fascinated, ever-hopeful inside cats).

But this is the first time we’ve looked out the window to find ducks in our garden. I guess it shouldn’t have come as a surprise, given that we live only a couple hundred feet from a canal. But it was still enough of a treat to send me scrambling for my camera.



Bye, guys! Ya’all come back now, you hear?

A Car Full of Roses for Valentine’s Day

Steve and I spent the Saturday before Katrina at City Park’s Botanic Gardens Plant Sale. Every couple of months, the volunteers at the Pelican Greenhouse used to help raise money for the park by putting on a sale of old-fashioned plants and roses that do well in New Orleans (not all green things love our heat and humidity). There weren’t a lot of people at the sale that morning, which surprised us until we were driving home up Metairie Road and saw shops with big signs in the window that read, CLOSED FOR HURRICANE. We looked at each other and said, “Hurricane? What hurricane?” (From which you can tell we don’t watch much television and so were oblivious to the fact that the hurricane that was supposed to be heading for Florida had shifted to take aim at us.)

A couple months later, we took time off from working on our gutted house to go look at what the hurricane had done to City Park. We had to drive the long way around to get to the Pelican Greenhouse because there was STILL water sitting in the dip under the railroad tracks. The greenhouse itself was a shattered wreck; the pots of the plants that hadn’t sold that fateful Saturday were strewn about wherever the receding floodwaters had left them. We’d been attending those plant sales regularly since before we were even married; a lot of wonderful memories of good times, sunshine, and laughter were associated with that greenhouse. Steve parked the car and we just sat in silence for a moment, looking at it.

If you’re wondering why I’m blogging about this now, it’s because last Saturday, on Valentine’s Day, City Park had its first Pelican Greenhouse sale since Katrina. It’s taken them a long time to get the greenhouse back up and running, and they’re still trying to replace all their cutting stock. Volunteers were going around the sale asking regulars, “Do you have a Phyllis Byde? You do! Can we have cuttings?”

It’s nice to be able to give back, after all the joy those sales have given me.

Stopping to Smell the Roses

I spent the morning weeding my garden. My poor garden has suffered terribly over the past eleven months. Its gardener has been MIA. Or maybe I mean AWOL? Anyway, I decided the house reconstruction could wait; I simply couldn’t stand looking at my garden in that state any longer. It started raining after I’d been outside for about an hour, but I kept working. It wasn’t raining THAT hard, and at this time of year, a light rain is better than a hot sun.

This was not a chore for me. I actually enjoy gardening. It’s in my blood. My 89-year-old mother still loves working in her garden, as did her mother before her, and her mother before her. My children tease me about my garden, but I only smile. You see, when I was their age, my mother and her garden amused me, too.

I recently found a photograph of my father’s grandmother: a little old lady surrounded by a riot of roses and tomato plants. On the back, my grandmother had written, “Mama in her garden.”

So it came to me from both sides.