Mississippi Delta Landscape: a Reading

(These photos are very wide. Click to see the full panoramic view.)

The Mississippi Delta, so the saying goes, begins in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel in Memphis and ends on Catfish Row in Vicksburg, a distance of some 200 miles. It is really an alluvial plain, not a delta, and was flooded every year for thousands of years - until the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built levees to keep the river in its channel and stop the flooding. The flooding, of course, made Delta soil among the richest in the world. In the days of plantations - and slavery - it was a source of great wealth for the few who owned the land. Today pockets of great wealth remain. The legacy of slavery also remains, and the Delta is among the poorest regions in the United States.

The cotton field above, though small for the Delta, is a typical landscape. The masses of color and texture, the patterns caused by mechanized farming and harvesting, create images of considerable visual interest, evocative images rich with possibility.

Apart from its history, the Delta landscape is extraordinarily beautiful, a vast flatness continuing for mile after mile. Because the land is so flat, the sky and the quality of light is an essential part of the landscape.

Here, a monster irrigation system moves across an already harvested cotton field with a sky tinted by the gathering colors of sunset.

This is a levee, gravel road on top, with a distant view of the Mississippi through the trees. The levee is very high, far above the level of the river, at least at this time of the year.

A closer view using the camera's optical zoom.

Getting to the river's edge wasn't easy. Here we found a road over the levee to a cement loading plant, one emblem of the commerce the Mississippi supports.

Loaded barges awaiting transport.

Close-ups of the opposite side, above and below.

Later, having left the river, we stopped on the side of a road to watch the sunset before heading into Clarksdale for dinner and a blues club. As has been said before, the camera always lies. I can't account for the varied visual effects of the sunset shown below. Phil was using a new point and shoot Canon; I was using a Canon Rebel.

Looking in the opposite direction, to the east, a hedgerow silhouetted against a background of changing pastels.

The Delta is a landscape where sense of place is palpable and complex - horrendous environmental damage caused by the Corps of Engineer's attempts to control an uncontrollable river, the horrors of slavery and a culture that built its wealth on that horror, the fantasy of the "Gone with the Wind" South, birth of the Blues, Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof - in an ancient land that still yields some of its primaeval past. Reading the landscape here is like archaeology, uncovering layer upon layer of history, geology, topography, ethics, art, and culture.

(Phillip Saperia contributed about half the photos in this post.)

House and Garden in Delta

Making a garden "in tune with nature" means simply planting appropriate to place. But place can mean more than the physical environment. Consideration of metaphorical associations with history, geology, and culture add depth and richness to the experience of the garden. Place can be much broader than immediate physical surrounding; it can encompass a whole geographic region - even the entire earth - or the universe. Only consider the importance of astronomical observation among various cultures throughout history, or the many connections between gardens, theology, and spirituality.

This is my garden viewed from the narrow area at the side of the house where overland flow of storm water builds into a flood before opening into what I call the "delta." It's a metaphorical delta. The river of water flows down from above, gains speed and deepens as it rounds the house, then breaks out into the wide area of the garden, very much like a physical model of a river delta. Perhaps I push the metaphor a little too far, but there are physical similarities between the hydrology of my garden and a river delta.

Phil and I just returned from visiting my sister and her family in Mississippi for the Thanksgiving holidays. One day, we drove into the Mississippi Delta, a unique physiographic province of extraordinarily flat land that used to be annually flooded by Old Man River. The satellite photo below shows just how distinctive the Delta is from the surrounding land. Starting at the Mississippi River, the tangle of curves and curlicues on the left, the Mississippi Delta is clearly demarked by the light shade of green, which ends abruptly at the darker green mass on the right where the hills begin. In many areas, this change is quite abrupt and dramatic. As you move from the hills into the Delta, the roads drop quickly down sixty or seventy feet, into absolutely flat land for as far as the eye can see. This land was flooded annually for thousands of years, and that ancient sign is still easy to see from above.


Since the 1930s the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has decided it can control nature and hold the river in with levees. Everyone now knows that this process is doing irreparable environmental damage, causing the southern coast of Louisiana to disappear under the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, and eliminating the wetlands that could help protect such cities as New Orleans from future weather-borne disasters. The river rises higher each year, the levees are built higher to contain it, and eventually the process will become unmanageable. The river will break through and all will be changed, at great cost - environmental, human, and financial.

Unlike the Mississippi Delta, my garden delta has no such grand implications for the future. Or does it? Water defines both, and its use or misuse is a subject of some interest, at least to me.

In my simulacrum of a delta, I garden in tune with nature. The plants that grow in the garden are well adapted to the saturated, heavy clay soil, frequent inundations during heavy rains, and standing water. Normally such conditions would create perfect breeding ground for mosquitoes, but the huge frog population eliminates that nuisance. There simply are no mosquitoes. Going with the flow, accepting existing environmental conditions, keeps nature in balance.

On a less practical, more aesthetic level, the garden complements the natural woodland environment surrounding it as well as the understated design of the house - its low profile, gray-brown tones, wooden construction, transparent glass, and massive native stone chimney towering into the trees. The house has low visual impact because the architect, William Hunt, designed his houses to blend into their environments, using natural materials and minimal ornament, and lots of glass to bring nature inside.

Out here, the sky is an important part of nature, and of the garden. Designed to complement its surroundings, the house is situated high, on a small man-made hill, where it is protected from the water and damp below, all the better to catch the light from the sky. In mornings and early evenings, it's flooded with natural light, as well as warmth from the direct rays of the sun.


Above, a piece of sky, with a Red Maple, and giant miscanthus (Miscanthus giganteus) in plumy splendor. Who is to say my garden ends at its physical borders or in this time? In my mind, it encompasses the distant Mississippi Delta, the farmers and millers who lived and worked these hills in the 18th century, the native Americans who looked up into this sky over thousands of years, the inexorable geological processes that formed these hills, these rocks, this clay.

(Delta photo courtesy Google Earth)