Taking Root

Description

Collected essays by two of America's earliest environmental authors retain relevance today

William Summer founded the renowned Pomaria Nursery, which thrived from the 1840s to the 1870s in central South Carolina and became the center of a bustling town that today bears its name. The nursery grew into one of the most important American nurseries of the antebellum period, offering wide varieties of fruit trees and ornamentals to gardeners throughout the South. Summer also published catalogs containing well-selected and thoroughly tested varieties of plants and assisted his brother, Adam, in publishing several agricultural journals throughout the 1850s until 1862. In Taking Root, James Everett Kibler, Jr., collects for the first time the nature writing of William and Adam Summer, two of America's earliest environmental authors. Their essays on sustainable farm practices, reforestation, local food production, soil regeneration, and respect for Mother Earth have surprising relevance today.

The Summer brothers owned farms in Newberry and Lexington Counties, where they created veritable experimental stations for plants adapted to the southern climate. At its peak the nursery offered more than one thousand varieties of apples, pears, peaches, plums, figs, apricots, and grapes developed and chosen specifically for the southern climate, as well as offering an equal number of ornamentals, including four hundred varieties of repeat-blooming roses. The brothers experimented with and reported on sustainable farm practices, reforestation, land reclamation, soil regeneration, crop diversity rather than the prevalent cotton monoculture, and animal breeds accustomed to hot climates from Carolina to Central Florida.

Written over a span of two decades, their essays offer an impressive environmental ethic. By 1860 Adam had concluded that a person's treatment of nature is a moral issue. Sustainability and long-term goals, rather than get-rich-quick schemes, were key to this philosophy. The brothers' keen interest in literature is evident in the quality of their writing; their essays and sketches are always readable, sometimes poetic, and occasionally humorous and satiric. A representative sampling of their more-than-six hundred articles appear in this volume.

Sujets

• Sciences de la nature
• Botanique
• Life Sciences
• Sciences et techniques
• Biology
• Fruitlands (transcendental center)
• Georgics
• Seed saving
• Pruning
• Bushel
• Apiary
• Chaff
• Sucrose
• Oat
• Gardening
• Agrarianism
• Humphry Repton
• Rudbeckia
• Paille au vent
• Agriculture
• 454 Life Sciences
• William Cobbett
• Robert Southey
• Robert Gould Shaw
• Drainage
• Adage
• Obligation assimilable du Trésor
• Millet
• Cultivar
• Horticulture
• Science
• Saccharose

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 27 juin 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781611177756
• Langue: English

Extrait

Taking Root
Taking Root

The Nature Writing of William and Adam Summer of Pomaria
EDITED BY
James Everett Kibler, Jr.
FOREWORD BY
Wendell Berry

The University of South Carolina Press
2017 University of South Carolina
Published by the University of South Carolina Press
Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/
ISBN 978-1-61117-774-9 (cloth)
ISBN 978-1-61117-775-6 (ebook)
Front cover image: Birds of America. Carolina Turtle Dove ( Columba Carolinensis ), 1838, John James Audubon (1785-1851). Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Contents
Foreword
Wendell Berry
Preface
A Note on the Text
Introduction
[A Winter Reverie]
A Wish
The Jerusalem Artichoke (Helianthus Tuberosus, Linn.)
The Culture of the Sweet Potatoe
The Season: Some Thoughts Grouped after Spending a Day in the Country
Natural Angling, or Riding a Sturgeon
The Season
A Day on the Mohawk
Farm Management; or Practical Hints to a Young Beginner
The Vegetable Shirt-Tail; or, An Excuse for Backing Out
Autumn
Winter Green: A Tale of My School Master
A Chapter on Live Fences
Report on Wheat
The Misletoe
Address Delivered before the Southern Central Agricultural Society at Macon, Georgia, October 4 [20], 1852
The Character of the Pomologist
The Flower Garden [I]
Plants Adapted to Soiling in the South
Plant a Tree
A Plea for the Birds
Southern Architecture-Location of Homes-Rural Adornment, c
Plant Peas
The Forest Trees of the South.-No. 1
Forest Trees of the South. No. 2.-the Live Oak-( Quercus sempervirens )
Forest Trees of the South. [No. 3.] the Willow Oak. Quercus Phellos
One Hour at the New York Farmer s Club
Flowers
Satisfactory Results from Systematic Farming-True Farmer-Planter
The Crysanthemum
Saving Seed
Roger Sherman s Plow
The Earth Is Wearing Out
A Rare Present.-Carolina Oranges
Agricultural Humbugs and Fowl Fancies
A Short Chapter on Milk Cows
A Plea for Broomsedge
A Visit from April
We Cultivate Too Much Land
The Proper Implements for Composting Manures: A Picture in Relief
An Editorial Drive: What We Saw during One Morning
What Should Be the Chief Crops of the South?
Northern Horses in Southern Cities
Scuppernong Wine
A Good Native Hedge Plant for the South
Soap Suds
The Best Mode of Stopping Ditches and Washes
Cherries
Amelanchier: New Southern Fruit
China Berries
Barefooted Notes on Southern Agriculture. No I
Chinese Sugar Cane
Cows and Butter: A Delightful Theme
Neglect of Family Cemeteries
The Destruction of Forests and Its Influence upon Climate Agriculture
New and Rare Trees of Mexico
The United States Patent Office Reports, and Government Impositions
Barefooted Notes on Southern Agriculture. No III
The Guardians of the Patent Office
New and Rare Trees and Plants of Mexico. No 2
A Transplanted Pleasure
China Roses and Other Hedge-Plants in the South
Barefooted Notes on Southern Agriculture. No IV
Farm Economies
Hill-Side Ditching
Landscape Gardening
New and Cheap Food for Bees
The Profession of Agriculture
Bell Ringing
Spare the Birds
Essay on Reforesting the Country
Spanish Chesnuts, Madeira Nuts, etc .
The Grape: Culture and Pruning
Advantages of Trees
How to Get Up Hill
Barefooted Notes on Southern Agriculture. No VI
Sheep Husbandry
Dogs vs. Sheep
Fences
Sweets for the People
Barefooted Notes on Southern Agriculture. No VIII
Peeps over the Fence [1]
Beneficial Effects of Flower Culture
Peeps over the Fence [2]
Fortune s Double Cape Jessamine: ( Gardenia Fortunii )
Wood Economy
Peeps over the Fence [3]
Home as a Summer Resort
Frankincense a Humbug and Cure for Saddle Galls
Who Are Our Benefactors?
Peeps over the Fence [4]
Mrs. Rion s Southern Florist
Dew and Frost
The Flower Garden [II]
Farmer Gripe and the Flowers
Pea Vine Hay
Our Resources
Works Cited and Consulted
Index
Foreword
W ENDELL B ERRY
Not so long ago, this book would have been seen by almost everybody as work of minor academic interest: peripherally historical and fringily literary. Now I believe it will find many readers who will recognize it for what it is: a collection of observations, judgments, and instructions permanently useful to anybody interested-and to anybody not yet interested-in the right ways of inhabiting, using, and conserving the natural, the given, world.
The authors-the two brothers, Adam and William Summer-were South Carolinians of the Nineteenth Century, but they are not, for that reason, eligible to be stereotyped and dismissed. They were literate and accomplished writers who wrote essays for agricultural journals. They were horticulturists: Pomaria Nurseries, founded by William, offered 1,200 varieties of fruit trees and vines. They were farmers and students of farming, of crops and livestock, their knowledge both scientific and familiar. They were sound critics of farming and of human landscapes, their standards taken properly from the natural world and from Nature, the common mother of all us creatures, the Great Dame herself. By those standards they were strenuously indignant in the presence of any abuse of the land, and they were clearly in love with the works of Nature and of good farmers. The work gathered here was written in the two decades immediately preceding the Civil War. It has a whole-heartedness and a tone of good cheer that seem to have been irrecoverable anywhere in our country since that war and the triumph of industrialism and finance that followed it.
Why should a book so much about farming be called nature writing ? To most conservationists of our time, who seem to have read and thought no further than John Muir, the only conservation of interest is wilderness conservation. But of course farming and nature are inseparable. Thinking about one leads necessarily to thinking about the other, and this is obvious to anybody who undertakes to think fully and carefully about either one.
Farming takes place in the natural world. Where else? It depends absolutely upon the natural endowment of topsoil and soil fertility, which were being plundered by bad farming in the Summers time, and are being plundered by bad farming still. If nature is to survive in our present world, it must survive in farming, just as in wilderness areas. The only health farming can have is natural health, and the only health we food-eaters can have must come from the health of farms.
And so the Summer brothers, as good naturalists, naturally worried about the health of the land. There was already then too much land abuse, too much rape of Nature. Too much land was in cultivation, as now. Too much was wasted, eroded, neglected, exhausted. And so Adam Summer wrote of the importance of trees, of woodlands. And so he wrote in praise of broomsedge, a weed, which he recognized as necessary to the renewal of fertility in exhausted land.
These essays display the exuberant, practical agrarianism that underpinned the democratic politics of Thomas Jefferson. They substantiate the often abstract or intellectual agrarianism of the authors of I ll Take My Stand . The Summer brothers, I believe, inherited fully and authentically agrarianism s ancient tradition. That tradition, which has outcropped discontinuously in the literary record, was enabled to do so by its persistence from earliest times until now in the work and the conversation of the best farmers.
Agrarianism names the culture of farmed landscapes apparently all over the world. This is culture in the profoundest sense, neither folklore nor the urban romanticizing of rural life, but rather the complex knowledge and artistry of local adaptation. Or, to speak more truly, it is the culture of the effort of local adaptation, which has never been perfect and will never be finished. This culture, however confirmed it was by their wide reading, came fundamentally to the Summerses as a birthright. They could not have acquired it from the proto-industrial, and stereotypical, great plantations of the Old South. What they got of it that was most intimately their own, and they got plenty, they heard from their forebears and their neighbors.
Lanes Landing Farm,
Port Royal, Kentucky
Preface
This work had its beginnings in 1972 when I visited Marie Summer Huggins at Pomaria Plantation. Mrs. Huggins, granddaughter of Adam and William Summer s brother Henry, was still teaching Latin in Newberry County. She was in her eighties and a faithful caretaker of the plantation. Pomaria was the home of Adam and William Summer in their youth, although I did not know it then. After her customary glass of old Madeira at the front door, Mrs. Huggins recollected my grandfather from the 1920s and 1930s as quite an impressive speaker of the old school. He had died before I was born, and this remembrance was very welcome. She then took me on a tour of the old house. She prided herself on keeping the original paint and faux graining from the 1820s. I recall her pointing out the large zigzag crack in the plaster of the north drawing room made by the Charleston earthquake of 1886. She refused to repair it out of homage to her forebears and for those who would come after her.
In the south drawing room she took me to William Summer s drop-front plantation desk. It was open with a Pomaria Nursery ledger recording plant orders from the 1850s. Beside the ledger were William s stylus pen, glasses, and brass candlestick, almost as if he had just left them when he stepped from the room. The chair at the desk had gone with William and Adam s younger brother, Thomas Jefferson Summer, when he traveled to Giessen, Germany, in the 1840s to study plant and agricultural chemistry with Professor Justus von Liebig, the founder of the discipline and an early plant nutritionist. Over the desk