Word: wisteria
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...actualities of life. So his books are full of melodrama: the last descendants of old families lie awake in crumbling houses; pompous parents like Mr. Compson deliver half-drunken lectures to their children; elderly spinsters of gentle birth talk hysterical nonsense to impressionable youngsters; young girls creep through the wisteria vines to meet lovers their parents will not accept; young men split their minds trying to make sense of the hodgepodge of Southern traditions, gossip, inaccurate history and pompous moralizing that is given them for their guidance...
...that is not all. The pines of Summerville, crape jasmine and myrtle, wisteria and roses, boxwood, live oaks and Spanish moss, palmetto, banana, poinsettias and oleander-only parts of Florida, not California, can compare. Even the low black swamps have a rare appeal. Cypress with spreading trunks and entangling roots...
With an abundance of verbal wisteria, April works its spell upon them all. The firm hand on the teapot relaxes. As the moon swings to the full, Miss Harding's luscious speeches come to ripe fruit. Just as the air is about to be like wine tonight, the castle menage, an enchanting crew of Italian peasants, bustle on the scene. It is a real pleasure to watch them become completely disrupted over the performance of a sinister English rite-the hot bath. Moments like this are heightened by handsome sets and adroit low-key photography. But alas, the story creaks...
There was much of the usual magnificence. John P. Morgan's gardener, James S. Kelly, showed a wide border of giant tulips against a background of flowering dogwood. Mrs. Payne Whitney's Henning Michelsen built a brick-walled garden, gay with wisteria and flowering bulbs. Marshall Field's George Henry Gillies filled enough buckets with rare roses to bring his employer six different first prizes. Greenhousemen built a 60-ft. bank of flowering orchids like a chorus girl's dream of heaven. A million dollars' worth of blossoms and not a bug or a worm...
...yellow & blue macaw by the name of Toto slipped from his cage in the stately Georgian garden of Florist John T. Scheepers, flew into Alfred Kottmiller's Japanese garden and began furiously to gobble all the blossoms in sight. There was a brief moment of hysteria in the Wisteria; Toto was returned to his cage; a Navy band assisted by a soprano performed "The Star-Spangled Banner" and New York's Flower Show was declared open...