Betty Davis believes in celebrating holidays and seasons.
Her front yard commemorates each opportunity with a cornucopia of plants and figurines. Davis rolls out the bunnies and eggs for Easter, and the flags and bunting for the Fourth of July.
When Christmas comes around, there will be inflatable snowmen in the yard and lights bespangling the house. Now in the thick of the autumn-harvest season, the yard is made up in pumpkins, scarecrows and dotted with that emblem of autumn, the chrysanthemum.
Davis, who will turn 70 on New Year's Day, had been gardening alongside her husband, Ray, at this location for 37 years. He died four months ago, but she continues to garden.
"I think it's good therapy," she said. "Ray had a big garden in the back where he grew everything. You name it: tomatoes, watermelon, okra, broccoli, cantaloupe."
The children helped with mowing and raking leaves after they got older. She has four children, nine grandchildren and one great-grandchild. Her daughter Michelle Page still helps in the yard. "If I place something somewhere she doesn't like it, she'll change it," Davis said.
"The garden was my husband's baby,"Davis said. "He planted that tree," she said, nodding to a 25-foot-tall cedar. "He dug it up out of the woods when it was just like a little old switch," she said. The tree served as the outdoor Christmas tree until it got too big to decorate.
Around the house and carport, pots are filled with such annuals as begonias, geraniums, chrysanthemums, caladiums and elephant ears. She grows black and green elephant ears in pots as well as in the ground.
"I let them die back, then I put some mulch over them and leave them outside," she said. She has grown one elephant ear in a bed like this for five or six years. She treats caladiums the same way, letting them go dormant but offering further protection from the cold.
The modest brick house is surrounded by an expansive area of grass. It is dotted with beds in the front and stretches of open space in the back. Statuary occupies every little niche, a chorus of frogs guards the entrance to the screened-in porch, an angel watches over the front door. A quartet of wind chimes tinkles from the edge of the carport roof.
Flower beds are surrounded by stone or cast-concrete edging. They are adorned with pinwheels, owls, scarecrows, roosters, deer, tortoises, goldfinches and even squirrels, a creature for which Davis seems to have little affection.
"I see them out there, and I run out and scare them off," she said. She also has had a rabbit or two visit on occasion.
What appears to be a hay bale accompanied by scarecrows and pumpkins is actually a cleverly disguised tree stump.
"It was a huge, old tree," she said, modeling her arms to the shape of the trunk. The property is surrounded by large oaks.
Perhaps most impressive is a bed of collards, planted in the front yard.
"I set them out in August, and I am waiting for a good, hard frost."
It takes a nip of cold weather to put the flavor and tenderness into collard greens. Though this bed usually has flowers, Davis decided that collards were called for this fall, and they look beautiful.
"I had to dust them once with Sevin to get the bugs," she said, referring to what were probably cabbage worms, a common problem with cold crops in the fall.
Davis summed it up nicely on my way out. "Gardens aren't hard, and they grow good food."
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