Taking Root

When I was growing up, I had a beautiful girlfriend for a good while and one day my Mother said facetiously, but not really, it would be nice if you and Louise wed, as one of Daddy’s farms adjoins theirs.  I imagine it still happens today.

A review of Taking Root: The Nature Writing of William and Adam Summer of Pomaria by James Kibler (editor) and Wendell Berry (Foreword) (University of South Carolina Press, 2017).

Perhaps land is more important to the Southern tradition than any other aspect of the region’s experience. Historians continue to grapple with questions that ask how Southerners understood land and nature. In fact, no honest scholar of the South’s intellectual history can deny the overwhelming role of land in shaping how Southern people viewed their world. Dr. James Everett Kibler’s diligent study into the life and career of South Carolina nurserymen and botanists William and Adam Summer contributes much to the larger, long-view story of Southern agrarianism. Kibler brings to light the historical significance of the Summer brothers, gentlemen whom horticultural scholar James Cochran refers to as among the most important plantsmen of the antebellum South.