This Winston-Salem Garden Connects Four Generations of Moms and Daughters

It’s been more than twenty years since her death, but Mary McLeod Council still thinks of her mother every day. “Bam,” as Mary’s now-grown daughters used to call their grandmother, passed away in 2003, at age ninety-one. Mary grieved in the most fitting way: She gardened. From when the peepers struck up their March chorus to when the roses of Sharon exploded in color late in the season, Mary thought of Bam all the time, as she dug, dug, dug, planted, pruned, and watched things grow.

“Every spring we would say, ‘Look, look! The flowers came again! The spring peepers came again!’ Like we think they’re not going to come back,” Mary says with a laugh, recalling her childhood awe of her mother’s garden. Now, in her own plots near Winston-Salem, North Carolina, she can make sure they always do.

Mary is seventy-six and has been tending this land more than half her life, since she and her husband, Chris, while out on a meandering drive through back roads outside the city, stumbled upon the house, a For Sale by Owner sign fatefully posted at the end of its long, wooded lane. What started as a bit of landscaping here and there has grown into gardens, plural, winding their way around the midcentury brick house and sprawling into new zones: the front yard, “south of the border,” “the creek area.” Plus, a porch overflowing with potted hibiscus and peace lilies, fox ferns and philodendrons.  

Mary grew up mostly outdoors, helping on her grandfather’s farm in the foothills of North Carolina’s Appalachian Mountains, taking camping trips in the Smokies. Her grandfather and dad taught her and her brother, Angus, about trees, foliage, fishing. Her mother had her children weeding the vegetable garden (those were green beans, not weeds, Angus!) and assisting as she canned and preserved food. But growing things wasn’t just about sustenance for Mary and Bam: They shared a love for English gardens—elegant but carefree, ordered but boundless, swaths of green painted with roses and morning glories.

In its early days, Mary’s garden was just a hobby. Then, in the produce section of the grocery store, she met the Winston-Salem artist Bill Edwards. He became Mary’s painting teacher—and her gardening confidant. Many of his paintings were inspired by his own garden. On garden tours he would take Mary around and show her every plant, and if it wasn’t in bloom, she recalls, he’d make time to describe what it looked like when it was. She laughs realizing that now, she gives tours like this, too.

This spring, she’s out working, in garden gloves and a sun hat, her hay-colored hair woven into a long braid draped over her shoulder. Bill’s garden encapsulated what she and Bam always loved, she says: a place “with no seams,” and that’s also what her garden is: a “beautiful profusion of color, and it connects. It flows.”

She’s always adding to it—and she doesn’t mind starting at the very beginning. “If there’s a possibility of a seed in front of me, I’ll find it,” she says. “We have even stopped on the side of the road—I’ll stick them in my pocket, and later I’ll pull those seeds out and say, ‘Oh, my goodness, where did I find these?’”

Chris has caught the gardening bug, too. While he’s been known to play things a little fast and loose with the Weedwacker, he’ll always make any big cuts up to her with new things to plant. “He brought home geraniums the other day,” Mary notes. “He’ll say, ‘How on earth do you know every single weed on this property?’ But I do.” Recently Chris arrived with a special treat: He’d found and ordered all different varieties of zinnia seeds for the two of them to sow together. They sit down and draw out maps of every plot. Mary treasures all flowers, but she loves zinnias. “What I’ll do is plant these annuals,” Mary says. “I’ll plant them in between the perennials so I have color all during the season.”

Her daughters, Christi and Jenni, have pitched in, too. “It’s like a fairyland,” says Mary’s elder daughter, Jenni, a portrait photographer for whom the gardens have inspired an ongoing photography project. “There was a vegetable garden attempt for a little while,” Jenni recalls. Between deer, rabbits, turtles, squirrels, and the ever-growing patches of shade under the forest canopy, vegetables fell out of circulation—but anything else goes. “Wildflowers, ferns,” Jenni says. “I don’t know that she discriminates [against] anything. There are cactuses in there, too—I mean, things that you wouldn’t think one would want.”

Mary appreciates it all. “It’s amazing how she can just know the name of every little thing that looks like nothing to us,” Jenni says, “or even know and remember where something’s going to come up that was there last year.” When they were younger, at family gatherings, the daughters would ask, “‘Mom, what do you want to do for your birthday?’” Jenni recalls. “Very often it would be, ‘Let’s just all pull weeds together. I need help digging these holes.’ Years ago I think there’d probably be some eye rolls. Now we have our own gardens and have found a love for it too…probably because of her.”

This love does run in the family. “I guess I’m a chip off the block from my mother,” Mary says. Meanwhile, she proudly recounts a scene of Christi’s daughter, who is just a few years old, crouched down on the ground in her own yard, singing a song to cheer on freshly sprouted flower buds.

To anyone who wants to have a garden like hers, Mary offers this advice: Just start. “I’m not grieving now in my planning—I just love it,” she adds. “I’d rather be out here digging in the dirt than anywhere else.”