From a young age, Claudia White has been interested in perfecting the art of gardening.
From her parents, O.B. and Sarah Wooten, White learned about the care and nurturing of roses and zinnias. Those seeds that were planted in childhood have continued to grow.
“I’ve always just enjoyed working in the dirt. I just enjoy it,” said White, a retired teacher.
White, 68, grew up on the Experiment Station in Stoneville, where her father was an agricultural engineer. Gardening has been a lifelong hobby.
“I’ve always done it, but when I retired from teaching, that’s when I really took off as a gardener, because I didn’t have that much time before,” White said.
Now, her home at the intersection of Claiborne Avenue and Poplar Street is a focal point for gardening. Planning a garden — taking a design and turning it into a part of the landscape — is enjoyable, she said.
“I do not care about lawns, turf. I’m not into sod and all that stuff. That’s just something that you have to mow,” she said. “If it’s green, it’s allowed to live.”
She doesn’t use insecticides or herbicides, which she refers to as “poisons.” But she does use traditional fertilizers, such as Triple 13, an old stand-by of farmers in the Delta at the beginning of spring.
“I watch The Weather Channel, and when it says we’re going to have a good rain, I get ready,” she said.
When meteorologists were predicting heavy rain a few weeks ago, White took her 50-pound sack of Triple 13 and scattered it about her gardens. Initially, she was worried that the rain wouldn’t come — and, once it did, she grew concerned that it might wash all the fertilizer away.
White also uses Miracle-Gro throughout the growing season.
While she has cut her roses back, she’s found that a purple cane plant, known as Tradescantia, is a survivor.
“You can snap it off and stick it in the ground. Keep it in the ground, keep it moist for a little while and it will grow,” she said.
White also favors exotic grasses, such as purple fountain grass, for the garden, although she warns gardeners to make sure it doesn’t overtake other plants.
She also loves daylilies.
“Daylilies are so wonderful,” she said. “They’re so nice because people will say, ‘Oh, I love your daylilies.’ I’ll say, ‘Do you want some?’ and they’ll say, ‘Well, yeah.’”
She said it is no trouble to dig down, cut some out, put them in a bag and take them to whoever wants them. Once, a woman at White’s bank said she wanted some daylilies, and White brought a garbage bag full of them into the bank.
She said this sharing among gardeners isn’t unusual. In fact, her garden phlox was given to her by a friend, Silvana Rausa.
White said it is important to select plants that can withstand the Delta’s hot summers.
“Use plants that want to be in your yard,” she said. “Don’t be looking at the magazines and seeing these English gardens that are full of stuff that are not going to grow in the Mississippi Delta. You always find them at Walmart.”
Whether they’re foxgloves or hollyhocks, they cost a lot and won’t last a season, White said. But there are other choices that have the same look and can withstand more than a single Delta summer.
White said it is time for gardeners to rake up the leaves, using some of them for mulch.
She offers other advice, as well.
“This is the time of year that you should never dig in the flower bed, and that’s hard for me not to do,” White said.
“When you do that, you go, ‘Oops, that wasn’t a weed; that was a daffodil bulb,’” she said. “Oftentimes you find these things growing in the wrong place because you’ve accidentally disturbed them. Don’t dig around until stuff really comes up.”
White said there’s an art to planting. It’s important not to plant before the last freeze and equally important for the plant’s root system to get established before the onset of summer heat.
That’s where The Weather Channel comes in handy.
“You have to be vigilant about it,” White said.
• Contact Bob Darden at 581-7239 or bdarden@gwcommonwealth.com.
