Second Summer

Make it stand out

Kendra Y. Hamilton

The rising sun is torching the forest surrounding our cottage in the woods; every silver and sugar maple, every beech and sweet gum and willow oak along the ecliptic fired to a candent blaze of yellow-orange, brick or flaming red before guttering out. It’s just past dawn in November — the second morning after the first hard freeze of the season, the first moment I’ve had to draw a leisured breath in many days.

Marc and I live in the kind of place where the neighbors raise cattle or goats for profit or just fun and speeding trucks will stop for geese crossing the road to get to the pond on the other side. Lots are large so the equivalent of a city block may be given over to a muscadine arbor, or a corn patch, or a hayfield.  

Our neighbor Rick’s cows. The calves were quite curious when I poked my nose over the fence..

The thermometer reads a firm 33 degrees this morning — these are seasonal temperatures — so how did I manage to get so out of sync?

Damn you, Indian summer! Oof – so awkward it feels to use the term I learned as a child to apply to the warm, perfectly still and calm season that sometimes blesses us in October and November. Where the term originated, no one seems to know, though a friend recalls her Cherokee elders suggesting a link to indigenous harvest traditions along the Atlantic Coast. 

Whatever we call it — the older, newly problematic term or the U.S. Weather Service’s sterile “second summer” — the season has been spectacular. Nature’s outstretched hand has felt as if she were inviting us to take our sweet time, and heedless of the calendar, we have.

Marc has been quite literally feeling his way around our patch of deep woods: marking the trees he’ll drop for the vegetable garden and perennial borders he has mapped out in his mind, chopping brush and saplings to give us a path down to our section of creek, mentally tagging small trees (beech, basswood) and native shrubs (blackhaw, beautyberry) to be dug, burlapped, and held in the nursery until replanting in a new location at the proper time. 

My tread’s lighter and leads out into the larger world that surrounds our little Eden, this being the postage stamp Carolina college town where the subject matter I teach — race and the South — has become a flashpoint.

Of course, we ourselves — an interracial couple living far from the People’s Republic of Charlottesville where we met and fell in love — are a flashpoint for those themes also, though our years here have both taught us which spaces to avoid and given us ample time to consider the ironies of our situation.

We live not quite 40 miles from the plantation where my great-grandfather was enslaved — by his own father. Barred from inheritance, he purchase farmland of his own to plant his dreams after “peace declare”  ( we still own it, by the way). That farm is less than 30 miles away. 

I’m reminded of his aspirations as well as the cost paid by so many others like him every day on my way to school, when I pass the home of “the last man lynched in Laurens County,” Norris Dendy, murdered on the 4th of July in 1933. His great-granddaughter is working on her pharmacy degree from my school as I write this–a sure marker of progress. But every day the news on the channel we’ve only half-jokingly dubbed “murder, mayhem and weather” gives us reason to know there are those who long to bring those “good old days” back again.

Vee and I dream about transforming deep woods into gardens, meadows, productive fields, but at every step we are feeling our way across blood-soaked soil in troubled times. And while the climate, weather-wise, is changing so rapidly that people who love growing things everywhere are hard pressed to keep up, the social climate seems stuck in reverse.

The “Confederate heroes” monument that dominates our town square.

“Sorry, babe,” I said, as I paused to stretch my clenched muscles. “I feel like I’ve been moving in slow motion all season.” Slow motion? In point of fact, I’d been acting like one of the redbirds at my feeder, basking in each glorious, luminous day instead of, you know, helping. I was hard at it now, pulling tight sheets of six-mil plastic while Vee, shop foreman to my grunt, worked a staple gun above my head. The greenhouse repair was moving at a snappy pace, but progress for me came served with a liberal serving of guilt.. 

Vee’s thought echoed mine. “Slow motion,” he drawled and chuckled, pushing a shock of hair — recently turned white — out of his blue eyes and back up into his ballcap. “I guess that’s one way to describe it.” He gave me a wink to take the sting out of the dig. “I, on the other hand, have been having nightmares for weeks.” 

Nightmares? The jab of guilt returned. Well of course. He was the pro, after all, a land steward who grown his first tree from seed at age 11 and who’d worked in every phase of the “green” industry in the half century since.  Vee had enjoyed the magical weather every bit as much as me, but he’d had sense enough not to succumb to the illusion that it would somehow last.  

The greenhouse. You can we’re still working on it. The top right corner hasn’t yet been buttoned down, and the plastic bottles filled with water and intended to act as a heat sink are still waiting to be placed inside.

Guilt was at least a change, I thought as I returned to my task. There had been little leisure to feel anything except controlled panic since I’d seen that forecast of back-to-back thirty-degree nights the previous weekend. Amid my foolish reveries of endless summer, the danger to our tiny nursery suddenly jolted me fully awake. I wasn’t worried about our viburnums and hydrangeas and antique roses, lined up in pots, waiting for us to give them a home.. Those were tough, frost hardy, and even in pots would be just fine.

No, my mind threw up images of the grapefruit trees I had grown from seeds gifted to me by a treasured friend; of Marc’s braided hibiscus topiaries and all the hours he’d devoted to their form; of that precious collection of scented geraniums, begonias, banana trees, and herbs that was all we’d been able to salvage from the moves that had savagely unhomed us from our beloved Virginia and brought us to this down-at-heels corner of the dirty South. 

This story takes place right after the first hard freeze of 2022; this photo was taken about a month later during one a rare snowfall.

You see, Vee and I had come to South Carolina under duress — pushed by the Great Recession—but with a dream: that we’d find land on which to farm and that on that farm we’d do our tiny bit to keep alive something we both saw dying: the notion that horticulture could be a part of American culture. Thomas Jefferson’s Charlottesville was the kind of place that nurtured such dreams. Indeed it was the modern Monticello, where I was a “plantation life interpreter,” and Marc ran the seed operation, supplied the garden center, and tended the display gardens that brought us together–a union of black and white that pleased some and rattled many cages on both sides of the color line even in progressive central Virginia.

What welcome would we have in the much less forgiving racial climate of my home state? We weren’t sure. And what combination of teaching and selling and self-provisioning would get us to the promised land? We weren’t sure of that either. We certainly would not be the first to learn that harboring any dreams regarding farming is a sure path to a broken heart. But despite two brutal moves, Marc’s bout with congestive heart failure, and a pandemic, we also were … not ready to quit?

So five days passed like a movie montage, as we white-knuckled supply deliveries and pushed half-done projects across the finish line. Garage rewiring? Check. Fresh plastic on the brand-y new greenhouse? Check. Seedlings—hundreds of them—repotted, fertilized, under cover? Check. New gun heater in place? Just as the sun faded over the western horizon and the temperature began to sink? Check. Check. That overwhelming feeling of relief as the last panel of plastic fell into place and the gun heater roared to life? No other words but… whew!

The sun is higher now and I’m on my second cup of coffee. Marc is  temperatures held steady at forty-five in the greenhouse last night. And it occurs to me to ask him if this is the longest season of “second summer” he can recall. 

“It’s hard to say.” His brow furrows. “I don’t know if it’s that the season’s lasting longer or just that I knew Virginia seasons so well.”

And there it is. That ever-present memory of Virginia, where both of us had lived and gardened separately for two decades before joining our lives in a single planting of intentions and where we knew the seasons like we knew the light and warmth requirements of basil.

First frost date for Zone 6A? Same as the Hunter’s Moon— on or about Oct. 21. There were four distinct seasons in our corner of Virginia, and the succession of flowering plants—from forsythia and quince to daffodils and deutzia, from roses to vitex to crepe myrtle to fall-fruiting bittersweet—was as predictable as the migration of Canada geese.

Here, we are further from the mountains, nearer to the sea, a full three hardiness zones south of the familiar, the known. The “official” frost date is November third,[1] but this frost fell a full two weeks beyond that window. That was the thing that fooled me. My sense of always knowing when I am with regard to the seasons is thoroughly unsettled, the feeling exacerbated by the reality that the summers are lasting longer, blazing hotter.

This is an undeniable climate change, like the fact that the seas have risen ten inches in Charleston harbor since the decade of my birth and that it floods now in certain downtown neighborhoods every time there’s a high tide. Heat is a bit subtler, but even my students, who are not yet in their twenties, tell me the summers are hotter than when they were children. These are climate changes that everyone can see but that no one can acknowledge–given the complete capture of the South’s single-party political class by the oil and gas industry. Indeed, I spent an entire summer driving past a “thank you” billboard erected by the American Petroleum Institute to honor  my congressman, Jeff Duncan.

My coffee has gotten cold. I stand to pour another cup. Vexed by all these imponderables, I wonder if I should add a shot of brandy.

But I can’t stop brooding. 

This is what "Indian summer" looks like in SC on a sunny day.  Photo taken in October of walkway leading to the greenhouse.

Fall is a melancholy time for me here in Carolina—and not just because I have to go inside for the rest of the year. When the sap slows and the leaves fall, that’s when the logging trucks really start to roll. That’s when all those sections of deep woods around the county that I’ve taken for granted—that I’ve even treasured for the shade and the shelter they provide to small things and for the views and the essential ecosystem services they provide as carbon sinks— are simply wiped from the map.

Of course, they weren’t, in fact, forests but rather “managed forest plantations,” grown to be clear-cut the moment the trees reach the desired dimension at breast height—a literal measurement, abbreviated in the trade as “DBH.” At that point, they’ll make their way to the nearest polluting paper mill—or, to a plant to be ground into pellets, an allegedly environmentally friendly alternative fuel that stokes the woodstoves of the European Union—or, to a sawmill to be sawed into dimensional lumber and shipped off to China.

So they don’t disappear entirely; they are converted into profits. These are important profits in a poor state, as the value of the state’s timber exceeds the value of all the other crops grown here combined. But looking at the piles of drying brush, the bleeding gashes in the clay soils left behind by the heavy machinery, I’m left wondering—do we know what the land is for?.

I thought I knew when I lived in Virginia, but now …  I’m wondering.

Wendell Berry, the patron saint of the small family farm, once wrote in a book that apparently none of his passionate acolytes have read that plantation slavery is the “hidden wound” at the heart of the American relationship to working the land. Slavery, Berry argued in The Hidden Wound, has poisoned all American relationships to work by allowing whites to bestride the earth like conquerors while denying to those who do the hard, dirty, thankless jobs any of the perquisites of ownership. Moreover, in degrading workers, slavery also cheapened the status of what was being worked—the earth—preventing the development of any relationships with the land other than those of extraction in the name of commerce.

Detail from jacket of Wendell Berry’s The Hidden Wound, first edition, January 1, 1970.

Slavery taught Southern whites, and through them, the nation to scorn all work that didn’t convey the privileges of “mastery.” To this day we reward “bread-winning” and scoff at “service” and “care-giving.”

Similarly, it taught whites (“Southern whites,” my Hoosier-born farm boy reminds me), and through them, the nation, to regard the land—seemingly limitless in its extent and its fertility in those long-ago days—as something with no more life or worth than a wagon. Something to work until it broke down. And then to discard. And then to move on to the next plot.

 I was amused, when I lived among Tar Heels to recall that North Carolina liked to style itself as the “vale of humility between two mountains of conceit.” But this comparison—however true in psychological or historical terms—assumes a parity between Virginia and South Carolina that in modern times is more illusion than fact.

While both states knew fabulous wealth in the time before there were United States—the time, let us be clear, of slavery—Virginia’s fortunes today, fueled by education and tech and proximity to the federal government, have far outstripped South Carolina’s, which are still dependent on industries and industrial arrangements from … the past.

Virginia, for example, is a top twelve education state, according to U.S. News and World Report; South Carolina, on the other hand, is seventh from the bottom. South Carolina’s GDP was about half of the Old Dominion’s in 2020, the risk of falling into poverty just about double—and this even after the economic jolt of the migration of heavy industries like Boeing looking for cheap land and cheaper labor is factored in.

More to my point, Virginia looks like a wealthy state. It has well-tended roads, spectacle gardens, and hordes of gentleman farmers who are wont to drop quotes from Jefferson’s Garden Book as they drop thousands a year on tending and extending their fields.

Rural South Carolina, by contrast, is a land of rutted roads, gnawed-looking pastureland, and houses simply left to fall. I don’t mean the economic capitals, the cities of Charleston, Columbia, and Greenville; in these centers of wealth and power, one finds gardens that compete for charm and individual whimsy with Virginia’s any day.

But the counties of the inner and outer coastal plain, through which I travel on my visits to family and old friends, are company towns: oligarchies where the levers of power are held by one or two families and life rumbles on much as it did half a century before. As for the rural Piedmont where Marc and I live, town after town was simply eviscerated as the textile mills’ empire of cotton unraveled over the course of the nineties and the aughts. Smokestacks towering above piles of shattered brick behind rusted chain-link fencing bear funereal testimony to a vanished way of life.

Despite the changes in topography, there’s a sameness to the elite districts of these towns. In all of them, a perfectly green sea of Bermuda grass lapping up against a bank of hollies, too densely planted and tortured into shapes nature never made, is what passes for a garden. And outside these districts? One can only describe the landscape overall as starved of beauty.

For many years, I have chosen to believe that Virginia’s superior allure was a product of its people—the fact that they were so much more settled on the land while also being forward in their thinking. That was indeed the chief characteristic of our world in the so-called People’s Republic of Charlottesville: people who were forward-thinking, on the bleeding edge—who didn’t follow trends, who made them, who also loved the land.

Vee, for example, spent years doing educational horticulture at the Center for Historic Plants at Tufton, part of that complex of research and commercial entities operating out of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. When I met him, he was the proprietor of a boutique garden design-build business for select clients, and he also sold plants propagated on his sixteen-acre farm way south of town at the Charlottesville City Market.

Our social group was largely composed of my church and university friends and his rugby and Charlottesville City Market friends. Imagine the most eclectic intersection of landscape architects, historic preservationists, painters, writers, musicians with vintners, vinegar makers, dairy and meat farmers, living kind of on-the-grid, kind of off. 

They could quote chapter and verse from the gospel of Aldo Leopold and Gertrude Jekyll. They knew Joel Salatin when…

Living further South, now, though—I have to wonder about all that elevated talk about understanding humans as a part of rather than the boss of the biotic community. Specifically, I have to wonder now about the extent to which it was all enabled by… wealth.

Generational First Family of Virginia wealth.

Agricultural wealth.

Tech, media, and finance wealth.

These, after all, were the people buying the historic estates who needed the expertise of people like Marc to restore and maintain them. These were the people who increasingly patronized the farmers markets and whose exacting tastes the farmers twisted themselves into knots to satisfy.

We experienced kinder, gentler market relationships in Charlottesville. But were these just another guise for a relentlessly extractive logic that, perhaps just one county over, was scaling up and imposing “efficiencies” to participate in the global market arrangements that are wreaking such irrevocable changes … in our climate?

Marc has gone to the kitchen to make biscuits. Did I mention the man is a miracle worker with bread? Before leaving, he’d asked me to “deal with” a flurry of frenetic message pings and tossed his phone into my lap. “In exchange for biscuits?” I’d asked. “Hell to the yeah.” Picking the phone up, I felt my spirits lift to see there were no fires to put out—just an invitation from a friend, trying to set a date for our first Christmas gathering since the start of the pandemic.

I should note that there are four more or less public gardens and gardening groups operating in our little county—and Vee and I belong to three of them. There’s the community garden in Clinton, an intentional effort at demonstrating interracial cooperation and reconciliation that we helped two local ministers to plant in a former mill village. 

The Clinton Community Garden Project.

There’s the  garden club proper, which we joined right before the pandemic hit. And there’s our current favorite group, a board dedicated to a healing garden at the local hospital. Vee has been restoring that garden’s original vision, surrounded by a dedicated group of volunteers virtually since we got here. 

A view from the Ferguson meditation garden at Laurens Memorial Hospital.

I sometimes marvel that we found Joanne—along with the mere handful of folks in our county of seventy thousand who are as passionate about community service as they are about old rose varieties, rare natives, and “important” heirloom collectibles. Joanne at the meditation garden; Susan at the community garden: These are women whose politics and life experiences couldn’t be more different than ours but who have become fast friends and virtually our sole social outlet since our arrival in town.

Joanne, left, serving cucumber sandwiches at a hospital garden open house.

Marc grows for them—we swap seeds and cuttings—we commiserate over each other’s kids, share each other’s stories, and throw big community gatherings with them, with music and food and folks coming together who normally don’t speak. Gardening—with these women and for the community—has served as a type of true north, allowing unity across lines of division, allowing a focus on what matters. Breaking bread. And sniffing the roses. Together.

“When the logic of history hungers for bread and we hand out a stone, we are at pains to explain how much the stone resembles bread.” That’s perhaps my favorite—and the most famous—quote from \ Leopold, and it seems apt as the smell of biscuits begins wafting from the kitchen because stones can also be used to make… soup.

Marc and I have chosen to center our lives around our relationship with plants—we came to that honestly, through individual passion and despite great family opposition. But we grew up at a time when, as in his favorite saying, “horticulture used to be a part of American culture.” Every year the coda to that saying, “it is no longer” seems more and more true. There is so much to despair about here. The hurting, cut-up land, the desecrated forests, the rising seas, the ignorance of the people. The (social) climate is not changing here—not fast enough, but there is at least the possibility that we might do something different.

The human soul hungers for bread, so we make soup and share our bread—and our roses. The gesture contains all that we are and all that we know of grace. It’s what we have. I hope it’s enough.

Kendra Hamilton, Ph.D., is associate professor of English & director of Southern Studies at Presbyterian College in Clinton, SC.  Her book, Romancing the Gullah in the Age of Porgy and Bess (2024) is published by the University of Georgia Press. She certified as a master gardener in 2001, trained in biointensive farming practices with John Jeavons’ Ecology Action Center, and has taught ecofeminist approaches to community building and ecological conservation in college-level, community service, learning courses. She lives on a “three-acre farmette” with her husband, retired garden designer and horticulturist Marc McVicker.