Emily Whaley, a South Carolina woman with a green thumb and such an eye for color that she helped show flowering Charleston there was bloom beyond azaleas and camellias, died June 15 at her summer home in Flat Rock, N.C.
She was 87 and had become something of celebrity since the publication of a memoir, Mrs. Whaley and her Charleston Garden, last year.
Her family said the cause was a stroke.
She had turned her backyard into one of the nation’s most acclaimed private gardens. Although no one would mistake Mrs. Whaley’s garden for, say, Longwood Gardens, as home gardens go, the one she maintained for more than 50 years on a 30-foot by 100-foot plot behind her narrow 1754 white clapboard house, in Charleston’s historic harbor district, has been a perennial eye-popper.
Among other things it has been featured in books by Rosemary Vaerey and other garden writers and has been a fixture on the Historic Charleston Foundation’s annual garden tours.
The garden has been considered special partly because it was laid out in 1941 by a renowned landscape architect, Loutrell Briggs, who took full advantage of a brick carriage house, a couple of mighty oaks and a magnolia tree on neighboring properties as backdrops of opportunity for a design that included five distinct gardens, or “rooms,” as Mrs. Whaley called them.
But mainly it was because Mrs. Whaley filled the Briggs design with repeated flair, adding a statue here, ripping out a bed of plants there and forever experimenting with new plants.
That was not, to be sure, because she hadn’t gotten it right the first time, but because her tastes changed every few years.
Until her book, billed as “a conversation with William Baldwin,” a South Carolina novelist, was published by Algonquin Books last year, Mrs. Whaley’s fame had been largely local, but well established.
After attending the University of Georgia she married Ben Scott Whaley, who became a prominent Charleston lawyer, served a term in the state legislature, was United States Attorney for Charleston in the Truman Administration and played a crucial role in creating his wife’s garden. In October, Algonquin is bringing out a second Whaley collaboration with Baldwin, a book of recipes and family stories, Mrs. Whaley Entertains.
Mrs. Whaley, whose husband died in 1987, is survived by three daughters, Emily Whipple, Anne Le Clercq and Martha Adams, all of Charleston, and seven grandchildren.
