Search for "node/claudia%20emerson"

Haiti and the Fear of Insurrection: A Review of The Slaveholding Crisis

Review Warning the governor of Kentucky that the white South stood on the brink of destruction in 1860, secession commissioner Stephen F. Hale wrote that Lincoln's election "inaugurates all the...

Covid Light and Darkness Alike

We can all remember when the Covid reality fully hit, that moment when we were forced to confront the stark news and the hard arrival of abrupt change. I remember...

A Plague of Bulldozers: Celestine Sibley and Suburban Sprawl

Introduction Roswell development, 2008 In her 1995 murder mystery, A Plague of Kinfolks, journalist and fiction writer Celestine Sibley (1914–1999) made her feelings clear about Atlanta's sprawl into the area...

Call for Submissions: Remembering COVID-19

Call for Submissions Southern Spaces invites scholars, critics, writers, health care providers, public health practitioners, activists, media producers, community organizers, and patients to submit 1,000-word blog posts, as well as...

MARBL Presents Atlanta Intersections: Photographer Chip Simone on Atlanta and Photography

Atlanta Intersections features Atlantans in conversation with Randy Gue, curator of Modern Political and Historical Collections at Emory University's Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library (MARBL). In collaboration with Southern...

MARBL Presents Atlanta Intersections: Susannah Darrow on Arts Organizations in Atlanta

Climate Change & Coral Reefs: Global Challenges from a Caribbean Perspective

Presentation About the Speaker James W. Porter is the Meigs Distinguished Professor of Ecology at the University of Georgia and a faculty member in School of Marine Programs, Water Resources and Conservation Ecology. Porter has...

Atlanta's Charis Books and More: Histories of a Feminist Space

Introduction Atlanta's feminist bookstore, Charis Books and More, founded in November 1974, remains a central fixture of Atlanta's Little Five Points, a revitalized inner-city business district that spills over into...

The Liminal Site

Red Mountain Garden Location of Smith's house, Birmingham, Alabama. Copyright GoogleMaps, 2013. My backyard garden is sited on the steep north slope of Red Mountain in Birmingham, Alabama, about sixty...

References
1.	We now live in North Vancouver, British Columbia, but—since we moved during the Great Recession—we were unable to sell our Birmingham house. I have opted, therefore, to continue using the present tense and referring to the place as "our house," especially because we own no other: in North Vancouver, we are renters.
2.	Olmsted Brothers, A System of Parks and Playgrounds for Birmingham: Preliminary Report upon the Park Problems, Needs, and Opportunities of the City and its Immediate Surroundings (Birmingham: Park and Recreation Board of Birmingham, 1925), 12. Reprinted by the Birmingham Historical Society, 2005.
3.	Ibid., 20.
4.	William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! In William Faulkner, Novels 1936–1940, ed. by Joseph Blotner and Noel Polk (New York: Library of America, 1990), 111.
5.	Edward O. Wilson, The Future of Life (New York: Vintage, 2003), 135.
6.	Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), 3.
7.	Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 166.
8.	Apparently they were not alone. As the leading book on dogwoods puts it: "Take a typical understory plant like C. florida that thrives in the partly shady wood with nice rich organic soils all moist and acidic. Once the plant leaves the nursery for that long trunk ride to its new home, the game is just about over. Despite all encouragement and direction, most homeowners run right home and find the sunniest, driest, and nastiest site with the poorest excuse for soil available to them." See, Paul Cappiello and Don Shadow, Dogwoods (Portland, OR: Timber Press, 2005), 32.
9.	For what is quite possibly the definitive treatment of diasporic gardening, see Sarah Casteel's remarkable recent book Second Arrivals (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007).
10.	On December 19, 2006, the National Arbor Day Foundation—hardly a political organization—published, based on the past fifteen years' climate data, its independent revision of the USDA's 1990 map of climate hardiness zones (arborday.org/media/zones.cfm), reinforcing what gardeners had been experiencing—"on the ground," as it were—for some time.
11.	Lucy Lippard, The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society (New York: The New Press, 1997), 264. Frankly, as a modernist I'm not much concerned with accessibility, and, at the risk of sounding overly literal about it, most people seeing the garden from that direction will have had to walk at least half a mile to do so.
12.	Louise Wrinkle's Mountain Brook garden, often cited in works like Sally Wasowski with Andy Wasowski, Gardening with Native Plants of the South (Boulder, CO: Taylor Trade, 1994), is a model here, or was until she paved her creekside walkway with asphalt. (In some cases, creating such an illusion is not difficult because people are not always very observant. In 2004, a group of non-neighborhood-residents calling themselves "Friends of the Vulcan Trail," on an annual and officious "trail-clearing" mission, veered several yards off the trail to destroy two of my rhododendrons, not to mention a small tree belonging to one neighbor and a mahonia belonging to another.) But the real impulse behind this sort of restorative gardening is what Ken Druse calls "giving back" in The Passion for Gardening: Inspiration for a Lifetime (New York: Clarkson Potter, 2003), 97–143. It's a different aesthetic and ethic from Schwartz's, which I deploy elsewhere in the garden. (Why choose?) Schwartz, notes Tim Richardson, "does not try to manipulate the natural landscape in a subtle way, bending it to her ends by using nature's own palette of trees, shrubs, and flowers. For Schwartz, such an approach is lazy or even dishonest, since her argument is that even the notion that unsullied 'nature' exists out there is patently false," see Tim Richardson, ed., The Vanguard Landscapes and Gardens of Martha Schwartz (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2004), 7. Like most dogmatism, such orthodox postmodernism can overstate its point. Habitat restoration, subtly aestheticized or not, isn't about pretending unsullied nature exists, it's about ameliorating some of the sullying.
13.	Partly because of gardening's perceived distance from urban youth subcultures and electronic media, no scholarly cultural studies treatment of its pleasures exists, and the afterword below is not intended to fill that void. For an impressionistic meditation intended to "inspire" other gardeners, see Druse, The Passion for Gardening.
14.	V. Vale, Swing! The New Retro Renaissance (San Francisco: RE/Search Publications, 1998).
15.	"I wonder," asks Tom Rooks, a landscape designer in Michigan extensively quoted by Druse, "what do people do who are in love with things that are completely man-made? Like people who are in love with cars? What we're in love with is so complex and so never-ending, you can never feel you've done everything or learned everything about it." Druse, The Passion for Gardening, 22. Druse's own metaphor that nature is "the senior partner in this collaboration" is schmaltzy but accurately depicts the basic ontological sense that gardening can resist fetishism. Ibid., 232.
16.	Edward W. Soja, Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions (Madden, Massachussetts: Blackwell, 2000), 401. For the classic postmodern-geography treatment of Atlanta, see Charles Rutheiser, Imagineering Atlanta: The Politics of Place in the City of Dreams (New York: Verso, 1996).

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