pods, leaving on the stems, she boiled her okra in salted water for precisely
seven minutes. Service arrived on small plates for each guest, with little
bowls of hollandaise in the center, the okra arranged spokelike around the
hollandaise. One lifted each pod by its stem, then dipped it into the sauce
‘‘more daintily than is possible with asparagus,’’ she wrote.^32 Brava!
Her genius with okra was actually born of frustration. Marjorie dearly
loved asparagus and, finding herself in a presumptive Garden of Eden, as-
sumed at first she might have all her fondest wishes here and now. Cross
Creek was indeed close to but was not quite paradise. The asparagus bed
she planted flourished—and flourished. It was quickly a tall forest of ferns,
but lacking a Yankee winter’s rest, there was never an edible spear. Okra was
her substitute. Similarly, being in La Florida, Marjorie figured she should
have her own avocados, mangoes, and plantains. Of course Cross Creek
was too far north for successful cultivation of these tropicals. Her clever at-
tempt to breed her own hardy avocado trees ended with freeze-blackened
stumps. Marjorie’s compensation was nearby seasonal markets, where at
a fraction of the prices in Washington and New York she might have her
tropical fruits. Sometimes Eden costs a little cash, and one will recall that
Marjorie Rawlings was in the orange business, trying to provide a taste of
paradise to the less fortunate to the north. In return, they might send her
some asparagus each spring. Eden, it seems, cannot be a private garden
but, rather, a very large space with cooperating parts.
Cooperation among provisioners in the long duration necessitates gar-
deners’ and vegetable- and fruit-growers’ cooperation with nature, too.
Conservation—which is management of nature with a respectful, wary
hope for permanence—is the word. Poor, heroic Zora Neale Hurston was
a conservationist gardener, even on ground she had no hope of owning.
The self-interest of victuals-in-return-for-exercise (and a bit of luck) may be
the soul of equilibrium, but there is also beauty, accomplished by wise en-
couragement of nature’s own power. Zora did both these well. Bernice Kelly
Harris, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, and countless other owners of land, no
matter how small, were the more obvious and the most rewarded conser-
vationists.
Marjorie Rawlings interests me the most because in the high age of con-
servation she boldly confessed her own lapses. Not only did she shotgun
red-winged blackbirds for pies; once she shot (with a ., like Audie Mur-
phy’s rabbit) an endangered waterfowl, a brown crane called a limpkin.
This happened not at Cross Creek but up by the Ocklawaha River in the
Big Scrub, probably about , when Marjorie was living with the cracker