The Avondale Estates Garden Club

Lyrics

There's a smell on Clarendon Avenue in April.
Pine needle. Magnolia leaf.
The good kind of decay.
The kind that feeds what's coming next.

George Willis had the money and the dream in 1924.
A little slice of Stratford, paid in candy bars.
But a dream needs tending.
So the women came, in their cotton dresses.
Minutes don't start until 1937, but the work did.
Marking the new plantings with wooden stakes.
Dogwood petals falling on the cool lake water.
Fifty-eight degrees, April 1939.
Someone remembered that.

This isn't about flowers. Not really.
It's the canopy. The sight line. The hundred-year vote.
It's the discipline of the dogwood, the argument for the azalea.
Holding the shape of a postcard, one Saturday at a time.
With sweet tea waiting in the AvonHouse meeting room.

I held the shears once.
Wooden handles, warm from a hand.
Stamped "Avondale Estates Garden Club 1934."
Still sharp.
They talk about the 1947 Ford station wagon, hauling cuttings.
And the two hundred boxwood topiaries, shipped from England in 1931.
Three survived.
They stand guard at AvonHouse. A quiet joke about ambition.

This isn't about flowers. Not really.
It's the canopy. The sight line. The hundred-year vote.
It's the discipline of the dogwood, the argument for the azalea.
Holding the shape of a postcard, one Saturday at a time.
With sweet tea waiting in the AvonHouse meeting room.

The minutes are clean. The tote bags have a neat azalea print.
But the archives are quiet about some things.
The first president's name.
The names of the men who drove the spades, who hauled the mulch before the Ford wagon.
The Spanish names, lost to the heat of a DeKalb summer.
You can't prune that part out.
It's in the soil with the rest.

The tour starts at ten, first Saturday in April.
They hand you a little map.
The work ends at dusk.
The sun goes down behind the Tudor gables.
And tomorrow, the work begins again.
The canopy holds.