Petal Power

Sophie White has created a barely contained wilderness of flowers in her small yard

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When Sophie White bought her house forty years ago, it needed work. She spent five years fixing plumbing, wiring, and plaster before moving in, but she started planting right away.

She had often visited the house as a child when it belonged to Joe and Sophie Ridley, who owned a nearby tailoring business in Old South Baton Rouge. “I was named after Sophie Ridley,” said White. “My mother was a seamstress for their business. She dearly loved Miss Sophie. 

“I remember Miss Sophie had purple and lavender phlox in her front yard. I thought they were so beautiful. She had a summer poinsettia and a red sage that still come up every year.” 

White, a retired elementary school teacher who rarely misses an art opening in Baton Rouge, said her father planted roses in her yard long before she moved into the house. “He brought me one rose that I call Aunt Ephine, because my Aunt Josephine gave him a cutting of it. It’s magenta colored and has a beautiful fragrance. I remember she would break the blossoms and float the petals in bowls of water in her house. The fragrance would go all through the room. I still do that. You get the pure essence of the roses. 

“Daddy planted another one in my front yard that we called Mr. Madison’s rose, after a neighbor who grew roses from cuttings. It’s a beautiful pink. It’s a climber, so you look up into the rose. They are antique roses that bloom all year round.”

She also has a yellow rose her brother Carl brought her as a cutting. “Now it’s so big I gave him and my sister Betty cuttings from it.”

“My aunt Ephine always had little plants,” said White during a recent tour of her garden. “That’s where I got my love for moss roses and old-fashioned petunias.” Pointing to a hanging basket of brilliant purple blooms, she noted, “These are old-fashioned perennial petunias. I ordered the seeds from the Select Seeds catalog and planted them last year in big black plastic pots. 

“I can’t live without big black pots. I sprinkle the seeds in them.

“I save seeds. I’ve got a whole big bag of them. I grew hardy hibiscus from seed; it is tall and red, and it blooms every year. I’ve had poppy seeds for years and years. Every year I plant a few more seeds.”

She even grows impatiens from seed. “I really miss the old impatiens. They were killed by a fungus a few years ago. Those in the nurseries now are not hardy like the old ones used to be. They’re here today, gone tomorrow. The old ones are extinct. I hate that. 

“I used to have masses of them. I’d collect the seeds. You can plant them so easily, just throw the seeds all over. Zillions of volunteers would come up. The plants root easily in water. Just stick ‘em in a glass and put it in the window.”

White, who has a bachelor’s degree from Xavier University in New Orleans and a master’s from New York University, couldn’t dig in the dirt during the two years she lived in Greenwich Village, but she indulged her passion for flowers on weekends. “I loved to go out and just look at all the garden areas,” she said. “I’d sit in Washington Square Park and people watch. And I loved the flower stands. My favorite thing on a Saturday morning was to buy a bunch of flowers that would last all week. You wouldn’t spend any more than ten or twelve dollars. 

[Read this: John Coykendall is saving Washington Parish, seed by seed.]

“One of the nicest memories I have is when a seller gave me a bucket full of flowers. I said, ‘Oh, I can’t afford them!’ He just thrust them into my arms and said, ‘Enjoy them!’ They were anemones, a brilliant purple-blue.

“I like blues, pinks, magentas. Those are my colors,” said White, whose yard and front porch are bursting with plants of many colors, some in pots and some in the ground. She reels off the names: night-blooming jasmine, kalanchoe with red blooms, asparagus fern, begonia, bleeding heart, delicate white alyssum, orange and yellow cosmos. 

Many are passalong plants from friends or relatives, but White finds them everywhere. “If there’s a nursery on the side of the road, I always want to stop because they may have something I don’t have or something I had and lost. I love just going to different places and getting something I don’t have.

“I find plants at yard sales and church sales. At the farmers market, I bought a hydrangea that was different, more lacy and frilly than the mophead hydrangeas. We used to call them ‘step flowers’ because people grew them around their front steps. I use nitrate fertilizer to keep the petals blue.”

She is always on the lookout for a new variety. “Something new will make me go berserk. Like esperanza. It’s usually seen as a yellow-flowered plant. I like it in the summertime. It will just thrive. I found this one at Harb’s Oasis.”

Inside, White has placed branches of azaleas in containers throughout her house, which also features large wreaths of dried flowers, courtesy of her nephew Peregrin Franklin, who owns Peregrin’s Florist. “I like anything that will dry and look good,” she said.

She is always on the lookout for a new variety. “Something new will make me go berserk. Like esperanza. It’s usually seen as a yellow-flowered plant. I like it in the summertime. It will just thrive. I found this one at Harb’s Oasis.”

“I love to cut things and bring them in because I love to look at flowers. Every day I look to see what I can cut. I love Gerbera daisies.

“Some plants, you get so used to them, they are like a weed to you. I’m used to marigolds, but I plant Queen Sophia marigolds every year and give seedlings away to my brothers and sister. 

“Some plants are considered weeds, but I like them—old-fashioned buttercups, evening primrose. My nieces and nephews used to make tattoos with them. I like honeysuckle because of the smell.”

While she tolerates the invasive Japanese honeysuckle for its fragrance, White can’t abide other pests, such as “the vine from Hell. I don’t know the name of it. It makes yellow flowers. You cannot get rid of it. It has built-in survival skills. It saps the substance out of things. It can completely kill trees and shrubs and bushes. It’s dangerously invasive.”

Aside from the hated no-name plant, White welcomes most newcomers, whether seeds, cuttings, or full-grown plants. “I’m so excited to discover something new,” she said. “I just get all keyed up. Anything that’s living is a perker-upper.”