Gardening for Love: The Market Bulletins

When I was a very young child, the chief family joke was the absolute necessity of assuring my maternal grandmother received her weekly copy of the LA Market Bulletin from the post office each Saturday. Creeks might rise and schools close. But the Market Bulletin had to arrive at her sprawling place in the country on Saturday of every week. Since she did not drive, that meant someone had to deliver it. Our parents, her children, smiled knowingly to one another and shook their heads when the subject of of the Mkt. Bulletin came up. But the grandchildren could not in any way understand why in the world anyone---let alone our busy grandmother---would want to read a folded sheet of paper covered only in black print. Even the newspapers had pictures. Not so the Market Bulletin. It was all print, sometimes small print at that. And yet it claimed our grandparent's full attention as little else could do. Years later, when I was beginning to garden, a colleague in the department where I taught, a Texan, asked me how he might subscribe to the LA Market Bulletin. He had a boundless curiosity about plants and everything else, and he simply had to have a copy. So I scrambled to see if the old bulletin was still in print. It was, but it was no longer free to non-farm owners. We had to pay a $3 annual fee. When my first copy arrived, I dripped a cup of coffee and sat down to read the uninviting bulletin that had been a necessity in my grandmother's life. Then I understood why she had saved a part of her Saturdays to pore over its classified ads in quiet. Everything from ox yokes to chicks to "good brown eggs, the kind you used to get" were available for purchase through the mail from residents all over Louisiana. Peafowl, good black-walnut lumber, goats, birdhouse gourd seeds --- truly a market place and not at all black-and-white. Very colorful. But it was the plants and seeds that most interested me. Old-fashioned plants no longer available in seed catalogs could be had for 50 cents. All sorts of bulbs, guaranteed to flower, were available for bargain basement prices, for almost nothing really. Their descriptions evoked country and small-town women who wore aprons when they gardened and whose bounteous home gardens brought in pin money even in the early seventies. Women like my grandmother. Their world and words are the substance of this book by Elizabeth Lawrence. Eudora Welty, a regular reader of the bulletins that for some reason were produced only in states of the South, had called Miss Lawrence's attention to them. It must be noted that to subscribe to these sheets meant that one had to be prepared to enter into correspondence about the plants and seed advertised for sale. Lawrence, a botanist in her own right and always curious about plants, entered into a series of correspondences that sometimes spanned years. One woman from MS wrote, "I love to work with flowers, advertise, and get letters from people, Some people write letters when ordering,

I don't live in NC anymore, but when I did, Miss Lawrence wrote a garden column and was known all over the state by garden club members like my mom who met her at least once. We lived in Guilford County which is part of the Greensboro-High Point MSA these days and she lived in Raleigh to the east, and then Charlotte to the south. Anyway, she understood what would and wouldn't work in the Zone 7 garden. (I still live in Zone 7 -- in Virginia).Miss Lawrence was the first writer to educate gardeners in our circles about the differences in growing regions. She corresponded with folks in other places and shared information about what was happening in their gardens with her column readers. She also informed readers about information she gleaned from the Market Bulletins. These bulletins were posted by folks who had something to offer or wanted something --gardenwise. The only expense involved much of the time was postage. This book is a fascinating compilation of articles Miss Lawrence wrote about the Market Bulletins. The sections are filled with newsy notes and humor, and makes one feel as if she is hanging over the garden gate getting the latest news from a neighbor up the road. Great bed time reading.