BEAUTIFUL DECAY
Stories give voice to old homes lost to time
Once the structural elements of a garden are built and the landscape is planted, it takes about five years for the plantings to have real presence and another five years or so for the garden to achieve an air of solid maturity.
This is predicated on continual maintenance and adjustment, on mowing, watering, pruning, replanting and all the other aspects of cultivating a paradise. If you walk away, the process of decay is almost immediate.
Even the most modest garden, thus, is a fragile and fleeting thing, and if neglected for years rather than just weeks, it submits wholly to the forces of nature. Shrubs grow rank, perennials peter out, trees expand and die, and any voids are filled with invaders, from dandelions to monstrous vines.
When paired with the corresponding decline of a vacant house, the scene can be romantic, sad, poignant or nostalgic, and often a blend of them all.
For more than 20 years, Merideth Taylor has been bearing witness to old, fading buildings in St. Mary’s County, Maryland, where she lives.
Most are small homes or farmsteads, empty and cloaked in a mantle of abandonment and decay. Contained in their flaking paint, sagging roofs and enveloping vines are the traces of lives that have been lived and the joys and sorrows of the people who once occupied them.
These “ghost voices,” as she calls them, have been captured in her book, Listening In: Echoes and Artifacts from Maryland’s Mother County (George F. Thompson Publishing, 2018). Her images are accompanied by imagined narrative vignettes for each property, where fictional occupants speak to one another.
The stories are drawn from oral histories that she has conducted, including those of African-americans whose not-too-distant forebears were sharecroppers.
Their ancestors were slaves in the tobacco fields.
Taylor is also a playwright and professor emerita of theatre and dance at St. Mary’s College in St. Mary ’s City, colonial Maryland’s original 17th-century capital.
Many of the places in the book have a haunting quality about them that draws power from their dilapidation. They are typically small, built by the owners from simple materials, and seem to date to the 19th century and the first half of the 20th.
They capture the culture of an essentially Southern agrarian community passing into history, a place where tobacco farmers and oystermen have given way to commuters and suburban tract housing.
Part of Taylor’s motivation, she says, was to explore the continuing gaps in our society between rich and poor but also the loss of a cultural landscape.
The properties were scattered in and around the back roads of Southern Maryland. They speak to a time when small houses were crowded with large families, people relied on vegetable gardens and farm fields to feed themselves, and frugality was not so much a virtue as a mode of survival.
The gardens were as unpretentious as the houses, with the comforting shelter of shade trees and lots of foundation shrubbery.
You find unsinkable, decades-old forsythias still bursting into early spring bloom, though there is now no one to love them.