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FIRST EDITION:
September 2012

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Albert, Susan Wittig.

The Darling Dahlias and the Confederate rose / Susan Wittig Albert.—1st ed.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-101-58151-3

1. Women gardeners—Fiction. 2. Gardening—Societies, etc.—Fiction. 3. Nineteen thirties—Fiction. 4. Alabama—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3551.L2637D36 2012 2012016156

813'.54—dc23

For gardeners everywhere, who tend their plants with courage, determination, and faith in a green and abundant future.
The Darling Dahlias and I are growing with you.

Author’s Note

I am a fan of historical novels. I very much enjoyed working with my husband Bill on the Robin Paige Victorian series, researching the way people lived in England at the turn of the twentieth century. I also enjoyed writing the eight books in the Cottage Tales series, about the life and times of author-illustrator Beatrix Potter. The books were set in 1905–1913, in the English Lake District.

And now, with the Darling Dahlias, I have an opportunity to visit the American South in the 1930s. I’m fascinated by the period, and by a town that’s small enough to walk wherever you want to go; where the local grocery and the Saturday farmers’ market offer fresh vegetables, meat, milk, eggs, and honey produced by local growers; and where neighbors gossip over the back fence and listen in on the party line. Movies have just learned to talk, and barnstorming pilots are an amazing family entertainment. Kids spend Saturday mornings hoeing the garden and Saturday afternoons at the swimming hole or dangling a fishing hook in the river. This is a very different world from the one you and I live in, and I love being able to explore its nooks and crannies.

But it wasn’t Eden. The Great Depression meant that breadwinners were thrown out of work and children went hungry. Banks and businesses failed, families lost homes, farmers lost farms and livestock, and many lost hope. Widespread drought turned the Plains wheat country into a dustbowl and dried up great swathes of the South’s most productive land. Prohibition was in force until 1933, and bootlegging was the regional (if not the national) sport, with all the criminal activity it invited. Huey P. Long and Father Charles Coughlin preached a passionate populism that inspired the poor, tempted the middle class, and terrified the rich. Racism, both conscious and unconscious, open and secret, was rampant.

My mother remembered those turbulent years as the “hard times,” and as a child, I listened open-mouthed to her stories of the challenges she faced. But she lived through those years because she believed that there could be better days ahead—as long as people worked hard, had faith, and respected and cared for one another. That’s the spirit I want to reflect in these books: the belief in the enduring values of hard work, deep faith, respect, caring, and community.

I hope you find it as reassuring as I do.

* * *

A word about language. To write truthfully about the rural South in the 1930s requires the use of images and language that may be offensive to some readers—especially the terms
colored
,
colored folk
, and
Negro
when they refer to African Americans. Thank you for understanding that I mean no offense.

Susan Wittig Albert
Bertram, Texas

May, 1931

The Darling Dahlias Clubhouse and Gardens

302 Camellia Street

Darling, Alabama

Dear Reader,

Well. It looks like we’re going to get another book written about us!

Which is not only a wonderful surprise, but a very good thing, in our opinion, because the story that Mrs. Albert is writing is full of some true and surprising events that many folks (especially Yankees) don’t know anything about. In fact, when she asked us what she should call her book, we suggested
The Confederate Rose,
because . . . well, you’ll see why as you get into the story.

But before you begin, we should tell you that here in the South, we lay proud claim to two Confederate roses. One is the flower that we grow in our gardens, which (as Miss Rogers will be happy to tell you) is more properly called by its real name,
Hibiscus mutabilis.
The other is the Confederate Rose, our very own Southern spy, who helped the boys in gray defeat the boys in blue at the Battle of Bull Run in 1861.

Now, we have to confess that some of us were surprised to learn about this Confederate Rose. And all of us were even more surprised when we discovered that our dear little Darling is home to the granddaughter of the Confederate Rose, an astonishing fact that was turned up by Mr. Charles Dickens, the editor and publisher of the Darling
Dispatch
,
when he was doing research. But now we know (and so will you, by the time you’ve finished the story), and we can lay proud claim to that, as well.

We’re also very proud of our little garden club, the Dahlias. In case you don’t know about us, we would like to tell you that our members have worked together for many years to make Darling the prettiest town in Alabama. Our club is named for Mrs. Dahlia Blackstone, who left us her beautiful house and gardens on Camellia Street, along with a weedy vacant lot that we’re turning into a big vegetable garden, which is important in these hard times, because some people are out of work and others are out of money and—

But we don’t like to dwell on things like that. Folks may not have much money, but Darling is still a pretty wonderful town, even though there may be one or two who (for their own personal reasons) want what belongs to other people and don’t much care how they get it. But that’s part of Mrs. Albert’s story, so that’s all we’ll say about
that
.

Anyway, while there are a few dark and underhanded doings in this book, there are plenty of bright places in it, and bright places all around us, too. We Dahlias are not Pollyannas, not by a long shot. We are perfectly aware that there’s a lot of trouble in this world. But we do like the old saying that Aunt Hetty Little has embroidered into a beautiful picture for our club wall.
We keep our faces to the sun so we can’t see the shadows.
It’s why we manage to stay (mostly) cheerful during these depressing times. And it’s also why we plant yellow and orange sunflowers and marigolds and cosmos in among the collards and sweet potatoes and string beans and okra in our gardens.

We hope you will, too.

Sincerely,
Elizabeth Lacy, President
Ophelia Snow, Vice President & Secretary
Verna Tidwell, Treasurer

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