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picture by : Clay Langdon .
The first time Mary Cooper came to my theater for dinner party , she brought homemade emollient cheese — in a French jam jar , wrap up with cheesecloth — and an armload of the most beautiful camellias I had ever seen . There were elysian pink - and - bloodless ‘ Pink Perfection , ' curly dark red ‘ Professor Charles S. Sargent , ' curly pink ‘ Debutante , ' ‘ White Empress , ' gorgeous , carapace - like ‘ White By the Gate , ' and ruffly pink ‘ Carter ’s Sunburst . ' We floated them in soup plate and demolish them into wine rinsers and water hurler ( ‘ Carter ’s Sunburst ’ has mythic long stems ) until my diminutive dining room was an detonation of candlelit redness and bloodless and pink . At that consequence I determine I absolutely adore Mary Cooper .
But then I saw her garden , and I really fall in sexual love .
The camellia are there , of course . And navel and sweet orangish trees , two kumquat tree , a Meyer lemon , and two satsumas . ( “ Because of the freeze , citrous fruit is kind of a risky business enterprise in New Orleans , ” she says , “ but it ’s the one thing I ’ll take a risk on . ” ) There is a persimmon and a papaya and a pear and a pomegranate tree and a fence hatch entirely by nasturtiums . There is common jasmine and Arabian jasmine ‘ Grand Duke of Tuscany ’ and an unusual icteric night - bloom jasmine ( “ It ’s a mutant or something — I found it in a friend ’s moo-cow pasture ” ) . Against one wall of her star sign are old rose wine appoint ‘ successfulness ’ and ‘ Maggie , ' and outside her kitchen door is the bush Kashmir bouquet , Clerodendrum chinense‘Pleniflorum ’ ( “ the in effect kind , ” she says , the kind that is scantily pinkish and sweet smelling rather than royal and “ stinky ” ) . And then there are what she holler the “ shockers ” : the powdered ginger ; the hiss of paradise ; the lycoris , or spider lilies , red and amber blooms that seem to “ come out of nowhere ” on a foresighted , leafless stem turn . “ They are so snazzy , ” she say . “ I just love them . ”
All this surrounds an 1880s house that was affect in 1908 to an idyllic spot across from the Mississippi River in a discussion section of New Orleans known as Bywater . The house , with its panoptic plank floor and tall , tall ceilings and rooms paint Paris green , is tremendous , but Cooper bribe it , she enounce , for the lot . Her early pace had been “ teeny patches of Mary Jane ” she could “ almost turn off by hand . ” So when she realise the abstruse backyard and long side yards of her current house , she get it on she could make a '' little Eden . ” And it is .
When I shoot the breeze , the three cat ( whose own catwalk up to the back porch has been almost whole taken over by plumbago ) sprawl under the table in Cooper ’s dining room , where she is caning the seat of a Regency chair . She determine a woman in California doing the same matter years ago , somehow pick up the art , and now does it for a living . While she works , I crunch on boodle cookies scented with lemon and fresh Rosmarinus officinalis from her backyard and hear to her tell me about the first plant life she put in the earth , 15 years ago .
They were crape myrtle she bought cheap , in a unreasoning buy , and she was determined to get them , with their huge root nut , into the ground . “ It was raining and freeze cold , and the house was practically falling down , ” she says . But she bond it out , digging hole after gob in her unsheathed yard . Just when she was about to give up , she pronounce a Isle of Man passed by in his car , rolled down the window , and said , '' You do n’t fuck me , but I reckon what you ’re doing is rattling . '' And I thought , OK , I can go on . ” Better yet , all the bushes turned out to be the same tone of Citrullus vulgaris pink . goad by that first victory , she set about plat the rest of her garden , with a certain “ vehemence ” as her goal : “ I liked the estimation of not have a garden that was perfect . ”
She also wanted to use plants important to the area . She hasPhlox divaricata‘Louisiana ’ and Louisiana iris , and clumps of anil and sugarcane , the state ’s first two agricultural harvest . “ The Libyan Islamic Fighting Group tree , ” she says , “ came with the Italians in the mid-19th century , ” and the arm of the sago palms , which are not palms at all but descendants of pine and other conoid - contain tree diagram , have always been used in the local Catholic church building ’ Palm Sunday services . Frank Cooper planted gargantuan reed alongside her water tank ( which houses goldfish ) because a booster sound out her grandma had done the same . Another acquaintance told her that nuns brought Rangoon crawler ( Quisqualis indica ) over from Cuba , so she planted it in front . Artemisia absinthium , or wormwood , is what absinthe is made of ; and vetiver , Cooper ’s favorite works , is say to repel that New Orleans terror , termites .
As a nurseryman , she is practical : “ I ’m not into nursing anything along . It ’s just got to get in the ground and survive . ” But she can be lyrical when talk about her works . The night - blooming cereus , for example , “ looks like a tutu when it open up . I can see why champagne is the only thing to imbibe while keep an eye on . ” ( Waiting for it to open is a notable New Orleans pastime . ) The blossoms of the pomegranate Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree bet like “ bright - orange tissue paper that has been crumpled , ” and the Nox - flower jasmine “ smells like cake icing . ” She make out the name of her Nipponese varnish Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree , Firmiana simplex , because “ it sounds like verse . ”
Her enthusiasm is catching . I daydream over a secret bush with lavender salad days , and she spout that “ it looks like Haiti . ” When I admire something else , she dedicate me a cutting . “ What is it ? ” I ask . “ I do n’t get it on . But face at the bud . Are n’t they cool ? They look like hoot . ”
