Carolina Mist (23 page)

27

“
C
ome on, Abby. Let’s take a walk out back and see what we can do about resurrecting Leila’s garden. It’s a gorgeous day, much too wonderful to waste indoors, and, besides, you’ve been breathing too much stale air and plaster dust for far too long.” Naomi stood and stretched out her stiff leg. Grabbing an old sweater from a hook by the kitchen door and tossing it to Abby, she pointed toward the backyard. “I, for one, cannot wait to see what is lurking under the vines and the weeds.” She followed Abby through the doorway and down the steps. “I do know that at one time, Miz Cassidy’s garden was the talk of Primrose.”

Naomi led the way down the worn path that bisected the immense yard.

“Oh, look.” She knelt and, beckoning Abby to join her,
gently nudged aside some green leafy things growing in what had once been Leila’s prized perennial bed.

“What am I looking at?” Abby frowned.

“Old-fashioned geranium.” Naomi fingered leaves of green filigree. “Beautiful. It’s a wonder they survived all these weeds and the overgrowth of clematis and morning glory and sweet pea that you have here, not to mention the plantain and the dandelions. What a mess. Ooh, look here. Lily of the valley. Purple violets. Some old roses. What’s this
…
shasta daisies, maybe? And oh, Lord, peonies. Abby, you have to get these uncovered. The vines must be two or three feet thick over these peonies. It’s a wonder they haven’t been choked to death down there.”

On and on Naomi went, from one bed to another, carefully parting the weeds, seeking out the remnants of Leila’s garden, punctuating her survey from time to time with “Wow! Columbine!” or “Rose campion, thick as grass!” Abby trailed behind, trying to share Naomi’s enthusiasm, attempting to distinguish the treasures from the trash and memorize the names and foliage of the specimens displayed before her.

“I’ll never remember all this,” Abby finally said with a sigh.

“Of course you will,” Naomi assured her. “Once everything blooms and you can see the flowers, you’ll remember. Look here, Abby, this must have been Leila’s herb garden.” Naomi tugged at the thick web of vines that grew atop the entire bed along the right side of the path.

“Leila must have loved lavender. Why, there is an absolute mass of it!” Naomi exclaimed.

“Lavender was Aunt Leila’s favorite fragrance,” Abby told her. “She wore it as perfume, scented her drawers and all the closets with it—even the bed linens and the tablecloths. She had sprigs of it in the trunks in the attic and the clothes in storage. The scent still lingers in her bedroom and her sitting room. Why, sometimes, I even imagine I catch a whiff of it here and there throughout the house.”

“This will be absolute heaven when it blooms.” Naomi
beamed. “Umm, just think of the potpourri you can make, with all this lavender and the roses you’ll have after we rescue them from that canopy of clematis.” Frowning, Naomi tugged at a thick vine, following its length to where it sank into the earth at the root. “Honestly, for something so fragrant, this stuff sure is a pain in the neck.”

“What is it?”

“Honeysuckle. It is all wrapped around everything and everywhere and all intermingled with the clematis and the morning glory and sweet pea.” She stood and shook her head. “It is like vine-o-rama out here. It will take us forever to sort this stuff out.”

“Us?” Abby asked hopefully.

“With all this wonderful stuff
”
—Naomi waved her arm in a sweeping gesture—“waiting to be uncovered, do you honestly think I would turn an amateur like yourself loose to work out here alone? You, who do not know dandelion from delphinium, will be closely supervised, at least until you pass the first and most basic identification test.”

Abby laughed and followed behind Naomi, who was clearly in her glory.

“I cannot get over the variety of herbs, Abby. Anise, lemon balm, chamomile, red sage, rosemary, echinacea,” Naomi whispered as she uncovered yet another leafy plant. “Abby, do you think Miz Cassidy may have been an herbalist?”

“We
ll, obviously, she grew herbs…”

“I think she may have grown them to use for medicinal purposes. I can’t think of one other reason why she would have this combination of plants, if she wasn’t into natural healing.” Naomi nodded slowly, a tin
y smile just starting at the corn
ers of her mouth. “Wouldn’t that just beat all?”

“Well, I know she always used the herbs from her garden for seasoning—basil, dill, rosemary
…
”

“And teas? Didn’t she ever give you teas when you were sick?”

Abby sat on an old stone bench which was partially obscured by overgrown vegetation.

“I remember one summer when I had a really vile chest cold.” Abby frowned, trying to recall. “She gave me some really odd-smelling hot tea to drink. She said it would take the fever down quickly.”

“Well, just looking around at the variety of herbs, that tea could have been just about any one of these—yarrow, red sage, peppermint.” Naomi folded her arms over her chest. “It looks like your aunt had a regular little home pharmacy here.”

“Belle said Leila had some gardening journals,” Abby recalled. “I should find them and see if she left any notes.”

“I’ll bet she did.” Naomi’s eyes sparkled. “And I can’t wait to get my hands on them.”

“Are you serious?”

“Am I ever! I am a true believer in herbal therapy.”

“You mean for colds and fevers.”

“I mean for just about anything that ails you.”

“I wasn’t aware that we had a healer in the neighborhood,” Abby teased.

“It’s no joke, Abby. Oh, I admit that I used to make fun of my grandmother when I was young. She always had the answer to everyone’s problems in some ground-up powder in a tiny glass jar.” Naomi shook her head ruef
u
lly. “All those years, I thought my grandmother had just been into the Native American thing, you know? After my accident, I learned just how powerful those powders were.”

The two women walked slowly among the tangle of plants reaching out from either side of the path, Abby waiting expectantly for Naomi to continue.

“Oh, comfrey, nice.” She broke her stride to lean over and touch the leaves of yet another plant. “Did I tell you I almost lost my leg to gangrene after the accident?”

“No. Oh, my God, Naomi. That must have been terrible.”

“I’ll tell you what was terrible.” Naomi frowned at the memory. “It was terrible knowing that the doctors just sort of accepted it. ‘Oh, we tried to treat it, but we’ve failed. Guess we’ll have to take the leg off.’ ”

“No doctor said that!”

“Of course not, but that was the attitude. ’We can’t cure it, so we’ll have to cut it off.’
” Naomi broke into a grin. “They did not, however, reckon on my Nana Dare showing up with her little satchel of powders and poultices.”

“Your grandmother cured your gangrene?”

“Now, sugar, does
this
look like an artificial leg to you? Now, it may get stiff, and the knee sometimes locks up, but, by God, it’s all mine.”

“What did she use?”

“A poultice of charcoal, some herbs, whole wheat flour, God knows what else.”

“And the doctors let her do this in the hospital?”

“There was no way they were going to stop her.” Naomi chuckled. “Of course, when my leg started to improve, they took the credit for the cure. But I knew what saved my leg. And let me tell you, as soon as I started to come around, I sat down with my grandmother and picked her brain, wrote down everything she could tell me. What plants for what ailments. What for teas, what for ointments. What parts to use, what to grind into powders. I could write a book, Abby.” She brightened. “I
should
write a book.”

“You really believe in all of this, don’t you?”

“Abigail, what were the gifts brought to the Christ child by the Magi? Gold, frankincense, and what?” Naomi tapped her foot impatiently on the hard dirt path. “Diamonds? Sapphires? No, my dear, it was much more valuable. Gold, frankincense, and
myrrh.
”

“What is myrrh, anyway?”

“It’s a gum resin, actually. And a natural antiseptic, for one thing. Useful in treating everything from gum disease to infection.” She laughed and added, “They didn’t call them wise men for nothing, Abby.”

“Well, I’m intrigued. And the first thing I will do after lunch is find that
journal of Aunt Leila’s and see
if your theory is correct.”

“Which you will, of course, promptly share with your best friend.” Naomi draped a casual arm over Abby’s
shoulder as they walked to the side of the house. “I guess Miz Cassidy didn’t much practice her little hobby those last few years, but I sure wish I’d known about this while she was still alive. I’d have loved to talk with her about it. I’d love to know, for one thing, who her teacher was.”

“Aunt Leila probably learned from her mother.” Abby paused at the edge of the garden and thought of the elegant woman whose portrait hung in the parlor. “Or maybe from her grandmother, who was a full-blooded Cherokee. And that whole side of the family—the Dunhams, the Hollisters—all lived out in Montana in the middle of
nowhere.”
Abby recalled her trips out west as a child, and her fascination with the ranch and the endless valley her cousins called home.

“Well, right there you have the ways and the means and the need,” Naomi said.
“Your—what would she be, great-
great-grandmother?—would have been familiar from an early age with the healing properties of plants. And being in an isolated area like that, where traditional medical treatment must have been almost impossible to get, there would have been times when the survival of her family would depend on her expertise—colds, flus, fevers, not to mention snakebite, bone
fractures…
” Naomi looked at her watch and frowned. “Too bad it’s so late, or I could help you look. I’m going to have to pick up Meredy in about fifteen minutes at school, and from there, I have to run on out to my sister’s to pick up Sam. He’s been playing with my nephew this morning, and I guess he’ll be about ready to come home and have his nap by now. But I’ll be home later this afternoon. Give me a call if you find Leila’s journal. And don’t do anything in the garden—and I mean
not one thing
—until
I
can come back to work with you. You don’t know what you’ve got there, so leave it alone until I can help you to sort it out.”

“
B
elle,” Abby asked over lunch, “you wouldn’t happen to know where Aunt Leila kept her garden journal, would you?”

“I believe she used to keep it in her sitting room. The one off her bedroom. Probably on or in that table in the alcove.” Belle put her soup spoon down and eyed Abby curiously. “Thinking about taking up gardening, are you?”

“I’m thinking of cleaning up that mess out back,” Abby told her. “If what I have left resembles a garden, I think we’ll be lucky.”

The scent of lavender was particularly strong in Leila’s sitting room. Odd, Abby mused, how at different times the scent was stronger or weaker. Maybe it had something to do with the temperature of the air.

She found the journal, a thick notebook with a heavy dark green leather cover, on a small table next to Aunt Leila’s reading chair. Abby sat down and carefully thumbed through its yellowed pages. She only needed to read a few entries to realize that Naomi had been right. Aunt Leila had had a thorough knowledge of herbs and their medicinal properties. For each plant, Leila had drawn a sketch of the leaves and flowers and, in her small, precise script, had jotted down the usable parts of the plant and how to use it to treat which ailment. Fascinated after having read but a few pages, Abby decided to take the notebook outside to see if she could identify any of the plants from the carefully drawn pictures.

Because of the dense growth around the herb bed, Abby had to pull some weeds—she hoped they were only weeds—before she could test her new knowledge. Leila’s sketches were, she found, accurate to the most minute detail, and Abby had no difficulty distinguishing between the geranium and the valerian, the lobelia and the tansy, which grew in a huge clump covered with morning glory. Abby put the book down on the bench and proceeded to extract the vines from the tall, leafy stalks of the herb. Before she knew it, she had spent the better part of the afternoon carefully cleaning up first one section, then another, of Aunt Leila’s herb garden.

The lengthening shadows from the pines told her that the day had, for the most part, passed. She chucked the unwanted greenery into the trash, then walked back to the
stone bench to retrieve the notebook. She sat for a second to survey the yard, her mind’s eye seeing things as they had been, so many years ago, when tending the beds had been Leila’s most welcomed task and the results of her labors brought joy to all who strolled the old brick paths.

It could be beautiful again. It might even be fun. And, if nothing else, surely the restored garden would enhance the value of the property when selling time came around. She’d read somewhere that most real estate purchases were made first on an emotional level. Who, she mused, could resist such a lovingly renovated house, one that boasted so lovely a garden?