Cuttings

They’re waiting. I’m ready to get into the woods and look for plants.

You don’t have be to a genealogy nerd to like heirlooms, and some of them are quite useful.

As much as possible I’ve collected plants from the home sites of a few ancestors in north Georgia.

A few slipped by me because I was complacent. Now there is nothing but the memory of the pear tree from my grandparents’ yard. They said the tree was on the place when they bought it in 1915.

I’m not lucky at rooting plants from cuttings, but I’ve done a lot of trying. I think I have one success at that, but I keep trying.

A guy who owns a nursery roots cuttings all the time. He uses rooting hormone and dips the cut end in aloe. He told me to bring some sassafras cuttings and he’d give me some help.

The best neighbors ever were a family that had an apple tree beside their house that was a great producer, but it was just in the wrong place.

I have some recent cuttings from that tree and hope I can do something with them.

Years ago I wrote you a note about the Thomason girl who went to the spring for a bucket of water and never came back.

Joseph and Sarah Thomason were born in 1847 and lived on a farm that borders this place. My father showed me where the house stood and the foundation of their barn. There was a small child’s grave marked in the front yard and a tiny grave for one of Mr. Thomason’s fingers.

That piece of land is developed today, but I’d like to ask permission from the current owners to look for some of the plants Mrs. Thomason planted around her porch.

The girl was eventually found and she was never in any danger. The story began to unwind when someone remembered there was a new boy in school.

They ran away together, something that, at the time, was called “stealing a bride.” The young boy was wildly successful, eventually owned a fleet of heavy wagons and the mules to pull them. Descendants of those two kids became bankers and owners of shopping centers in Arizona.

Robert and Martha Moody lived on a place across the highway. The farm is grown up in trees, but the owner twenty years ago said he could take me to the spot where the house stood.

I should have done it because the place is covered by recent development, but I think it would be interesting to get permission to look for the house place based upon descendants of landscaping plants still thriving.

“Aunt Martha” as she was known, was made a widow when she was thirty years old, and Robert was buried where he died in Mechcanicsville, VA, in 1862.

She was a widow for fifty years. I have my spade and bucket ready to get into the woods and find some ancestors, plant ancestors.

joenphillips@yahoo.com