Clover Garden: A Carolinian’s Piedmont Memoir

Between North Carolina’s coastal plain and the Blue Ridge Mountains lies the Piedmont: some 250 linear miles of rolling, long-settled lands covering almost half of the state. Geologically speaking, piedmont regions are found all over the world, but North Carolina’s Piedmont is among the largest in the United States, sitting along an environmental crossroads where northern and southern flora and fauna overlap, offering an incredibly rich natural diversity. Inhabited continuously for thousands of years, the state’s rural heartland is today home to an increasingly dense population. Yet most who reside in the region’s cities, suburbs, and smaller towns still live within reach of red-clay farmland, oak and hickory forests watered by small creeks, and rocky river valleys. These places--as they have been and as they are now--remain essential to the character of life in the South.

Through his long, celebrated writing career, Bland Simpson has earned a reputation as the bard of North Carolina’s coasts and sound country. Here, for the first time, he trains his attention on Clover Garden, the Piedmont community where he has lived for some fifty years. With a naturalist’s eye, a storyteller’s mind, and a poet’s soul, Simpson guides readers into a deep engagement with the Piedmont, both as a material place and as an idea. Illustrated with photographs by Ann Cary Simpson, Clover Garden invites us to think more broadly about the natural and human history of the piedmont South. This book will be treasured by all who seek to live deeply in the places we call home.

Bland Simpson is Kenan Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His most recent book is North Carolina: Land of Water, Land of Sky. He is also longtime pianist for the Tony Award-winning string band The Red Clay Ramblers. In 2005 he received the North Carolina Award, the state’s highest civilian honor.

Ann Cary Simpson, photographer, served for thirty years at national and North Carolina environmental organizations and as associate dean for development at UNC’s School of Government, for which she received the Chancellor’s Award. She is now a senior associate with moss + ross consulting.