Angel Trumpets & Po' White Trash

And Why the Red Ones Won't Flower

“It’s rough and worn-down in the mill village. They’ll be suspicious of you and talk mostly to me at first. But they’re salt of the earth people.” This kind of poverty, this tight-knit community, was all new to me. He went on, “But you won't believe the Angel Trumpets in Red’s backyard.”

Porter maneuvered his cushy, brand-new 1993 GMC pickup through narrow mill village streets. He pointed out places he remembered from childhood. He tried to get me ready for this poor, insular community. 

The front of these ratty duplexes needed a junk man to clear out the old water heaters and tires. The porch rails sagged. Each two-story saltbox duplex stood shoulder to shoulder, not more than 10 feet from the next. Sturdy but dirty. I guess living by a railroad track doesn’t help.  One mill still operated, but it seemed creaky, doomed by the building globalization of the 90s. This little village kept its head in the sand; houses, cars, and people looked like worn-out 1970s. 

Between two close-set houses, a man as scruffy as the house eyed us. He looked like a Raggedy Andy doll — red hair like yarn, overalls with one strap hanging loose, thick black plastic glasses. He was too skinny for the massive baritone boom that came out of him in sing-song of a children's rhyme.

He directed his loud song toward us,

“Porter, Porter, he’ll paddle you hard if you bring this school disorder! “

Then he walked over, leaned against the driver's window, and grinned ear to ear at my companion, “Young’uns used to sing that about you. You remember? Ooo-wee, it were true too— weren’t it, Mr. Porter?"

Mr. Porter, former principal and my tour guide, said, “You best remember it too. I still have that paddle and can still put you over my knee. But we came to see your flowers today.” Porter was just a few years older, but this man looked haggard. Worn hard, put away wet. They laughed and reminisced for a few minutes. I studied this little man without staring--he was dirty, skinny, and worn but captivating.

It looked like he had tried to calm his hair with brylcream. But that didn't work. Didn’t last anyway— a few hours gardening in August humidity released those cartoonish red dreadlocks. A thick stubble where his jaw might have been, if he had one, swirled around his neck. It was thicker on the side where it joined flaming orange chest hair. He didn’t really have a chest, though, so his tissue-thin t-shirt hung off his shoulders like a shirt on a hanger. 

Porter finally called me in, “Red works at the quarry. But he’s gardened down in Florida. And now he’s growing more angle trumpets than anybody around.” Porter said as an introduction. 

Behind Red’s glasses, steel blue eyes locked on mine so tight that anything raggedy about him evaporated. “Any friend of Porter’s is a friend of mine. He talks too good about my plants though. I just got a forest of things I brought back from Florida." In his accent, it was Flor-ya-deee. He pointed to a beat-up, tiny Toyota truck with a camper top.

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Porter had told me about him. I knew that as a teen, he’d run away from an abusive father and hopped on a train to Jacksonville. I knew he’d ended up gardening in Coral Gables. And I knew he'd been taken in by and gardened for the renowned Ernesto-- a notorious Cuban plant collector who had the rarest tropical plants and always had a collection of misfit young men tending the walled nursery.

I was about to say I know Ernesto when a lithe, muscled young man came out of the house. He wore nothing but cut-off jeans. No shoes. No shirt. His body was smooth as a Dutchboy Doll, and he had a ragged, black crew cut. He didn’t say a word. He didn’t look at us. He held out a plastic tray with three ice teas, which we took. When I said thank you, he said, “Yessir,” even though I was barely older than him, and he went back inside. 

We walked down his little alley, stepping over bags of soil, old pots, a wheelbarrow, and a cage on stilts. “My girls,” he said, “love me some quail eggs.”

Around the corner, I caught a glimpse of the railroad tracks through a forest of 15-foot-tall shrubs. Every single angle trumpet shrub had been pruned up, so you walked under them. We stepped in. Overhead, a stunning canopy of huge yellow flowers hung. “That’s Charles Grimaldi—the best. If I only had one, I’d have Charles. At night, you know. We….”

A deafening train rumbled by. When it passed, Red continued his sentence, “I can smell those flowers in the house and even round the porch.”

In the little backyard, the ground was swept clean. Nothing low but a few big buckets full of rainwater and a metal desk chair with a milk crate for a stool. From the clean gray ground, a forest of smooth-barked trunks.

“Tell him about the reds. When you gonna have your heat-loving red ready?” Porter said. Red sighed out a load of frustration. He moved toward the tracks and pointed to a single, skinny red, angle trumpet flower way up on a huge, healthy bush. “Sanginaria don’t really like it here. It grows just as good as any, but scarce flowers in the summer; they start up in November about the time we get a killing frost.”

I thought I knew why, so I said, “The red species depends on daylight? When we start getting short days, it flowers. But then our cold comes, and the flowers all get burned up?”  He gave me a look that said, ‘Son. Don’t interrupt your elders,’ but he said,

“No, ain't just the day length. That’s true for a lot of other plants I hauled up here from Florida. But this one, it’s from high elevations in the Andes mountains. Ernesto had been to see them. He’s Cuban, you know, but his rich lady clients in Miami paid him to go collect rare plants all over South America. Cold tropics is crazy aint it? They got tropical plants, but it’s always between 40 and 70 degrees. It’s the chilly air that stimulates them to flower.  I been hybridizing for 20 years trying to breed that red color into a species like Charles come from. Trying to lose that cold requirement and get a red that flowers all summer.”  He went on,

“I got Brugmansia. vulcanecola ‘Sunset Vulsa’ too. Same way.” 

He said all that in one breath, slurred, with a lot of zs, confident, sensual and I played with his pronunciation in my head like a meditation mantra; Broug man zia…. vuulcan ee coula sunzet vullzza .

This was the first time he used the genus name. I’d always said it Brug to rhyme with mood. He said, Braugh, so it sounds like ought. Brough-mans-zia. Was that correct?

Red was confusing to me in so many ways. His English was terrible, but I think his botanical Latin was spot-on better than mine. He looked like an old redneck— straight, of course. But I knew that Porter and Ernesto were gay. There was no sign of a wife or children, but the young man acted like a well-trained son. I’d been around boi/daddy culture before.

If he was in that group, we probably have friends in common— maybe he even knew my uncle. But some unspoken, unseen barrier was there. I knew not to breach it. I knew that no matter how long I'd maintain his aquantice, it would always be limited to plant-talk.

He went on talking about 'Sunset Vulsa.'

“She’s over here. Little flowers will start growing sometimes; get to where you can see them hang about two inches. Then, the heat makes them drop right off. But you folks at the botanical garden could build a cool house, no heat or anything, just top cover. They’d love that. You could plant a whole forest like this and flower all winter jes like they do in Florida.”

“I‘m gonna wait for a forest of your red cultivars. Looks like you’re focused on that goal and know how to get there,” I told him. I didn't tell him there was no way I was going to build a cool house. I didn't tell him; in the world I grew up in, Angel Trumpets were considered too showy, too coarse, and too trashy. Where I came from, these were poor people’s plants, probably because they were gaudy but also because they were easy to root and share.

Porter, who dealt with youngsters his whole life, never said outright that I was being a plant snob. For months, he waited patiently, shared more backyard and pass-along plants, and gently opened my mind. But one day, on a road trip in his truck, he looked at me and said, “Get off your horticultural high horse. And while you’re at it, you might as well admit you love all these country people— you ran from them, but you came from them.”

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Porter and Red, both slightly fictionalized here, were both real people who made important contributions to my book ‘Garden Disruptors.’ They both grew up poor, disparaged mill villagers. They both found a passion, solace, and community in plants. I wrote ‘Garden Disruptors’ to document and celebrate stories like theirs.

Thanks to Tony Le-Briton for letting me share his spectacular video. Click on his name to follow him on Instagram and his new book, ‘Not Another Jungle: Comprehensive Care for Extraordinary Houseplants.’