sweetgrass FEATURE.qxp:new orleans FEATURE
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Written by Stephanie Hunt
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Photographs by Jim Brueckner
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The Lowcountry autumn is polite and mild-mannered.
She doesn’t blow in all flashy and brisk, decked out in
boisterous colors, calling attention to herself. Those
accustomed to October’s showy displays in higher
elevations might have difficulty acclimating to the
subtle way that summer here slips into fall. The changes
are incremental-the sunlight crisps, humidity
(thankfully) lifts, and sunsets ripen to a deep, intoxicating vermillion, like cabernet spilled across the horizon. And along marsh fronts and near the dune line, a
gorgeous purple haze appears, breathy and delicate. It is
the wispy blooms of sweetgrass, Muhlenbergia
capillaris, aptly dubbed “regal mist” for its lavender
cloud-like blossoms, our sublime autumn consolation.
In one of nature’s small ironies, this hearty, tufted
grassthatthrivesinaharshenvironmentofwindandsalt
water is graced with fine, lithe flowers. Similarly, it’s
ironic that fall, the season of transition, is heralded by
the sweetgrass bloom, for this lowly native plant has
cometosymbolizethatwhichhadremainedunchanged
for centuries andthat whichisrapidlychanging today.
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“I love showing
children where
Africa is and
how the baskets
we make here
are the same as
the onesmade
thousandsof
miles away.”
-NakiaWigfall
A Continuous Strand
found in a museum or living room than in a
Descendants of slaves who arrived on
rice field, little has changed about
Sullivan’s Island and worked on nearby planLowcountry basketmaking culture. The
tations, such as Mount Pleasant’s Boone
weaving itself is an art of continuity—a basHall, have been pulling stems of sweetgrass
ketmaker keeps feeding new strands of
from their sheaths and coiling them into
grass into the coils, and each coil builds on
baskets sewn with strips of palm for more
another. The tradition is passed along from
than 300 years. As historian Dale Rosengeneration to generation; mothers still
garten has documented, the trademark
teach their children, just as their mothers or
Charleston baskets trace directly to West
fathers taught them, resulting in a tightly
Africa, near Senegal and Gambia, where the
woven community of Mount Pleasant famitradition of coiled grass baskets goes back
lies whose ancestors worked the fields in
c e n t u r i e s
and around Hungryneck
further. Enslaved Africans from
Boulevard.
the region brought skills that
Nakia Wigfall, a multimade the Carolina plantations
generational basket sewer,
prosperous, including the art
holds tight to this heritage. As
of basketmaking—these coiled
president of the Mount
“fanning” baskets were used
Pleasant Basketmakers Assocto separate rice grains from
iation, she is an advocate and
their chaff.
College of Charleston
ambassador for the basketThough today’s sweetgrass
professor and author
making community. “When I
baskets are more likely to be
Dale Rosengarten
visit classrooms, I love show140
|CHARLESTON
This lowly native
plant has come to
symbolize that
which had
remained
unchanged for
centuries and that
which is rapidly
changing today.
Multigenerational basketmaker Nakia
Wigfall (top) demonstrates the age-old
technique of sewing baskets in her
Mount Pleasant yard, where she
grows sweetgrass.
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ing children where Africa is and how the
baskets we make here are the same as those
made thousands of miles away,” she says.
Wigfall celebrates an inherited and largely
unchanged art, but she’s also aware that the
sweetgrass she pulls and weaves, as well as
the larger coil of tradition upon which she
builds, is vulnerable to changes beyond her
control.
Wigfall lives on the same quiet lot in
Mount Pleasant’s Six Mile community where
her grandparents and great-grandparents
lived, but the area is no longer rural—it’s saturated. A large tract where her mother once
collected sweetgrass is slated for development, and the surrounding areas are choked
with shopping centers and new neighborhoods, with a Super Wal-Mart on the way.
The story is all too familiar up and down the
coast: droves of new residents are migrating
toward the beach, displacing plants, animals,
and people native to the area.
The sweetgrass supply has been dwindling for years, and local basketmakers have
been forced to supplement with harsher
materials like bulrush or to buy grass from
those who travel to Florida and Georgia to
find it. Some of the iconic basket stands that
used to flank Highway 17 have relocated
A sweetgrass seller displays her wares
amidst the traffic of Highway 17 North.
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2:47 PM
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Wigfall shows the difference between naturally occurring and cultivated sweetgrass:
transplanted grass (top) tends to be thicker and more brittle due to fertilization,
whereas the native species that Wigfall planted in her yard (bottom) is softer but shorter.
after becoming crowded out by strip malls
and traffic hazards.“When I was four or five,
I’d walk with my mother out to our roadside stand,” says Wigfall. “She carried heavy
loads of baskets and I carried our lunch.
Some days few cars would pass by and
none stopped. These days the traffic is so
loud you can’t hear yourself think.”
Even so, many people are thinking long
and hard about how to protect and preserve
native sweetgrass and traditional basketmaking. Cultural, environmental, political, and
economic concerns are intertwined, and the
basketmakers’ plight has drawn attention
across disciplines, from biologists, social scientists, policy makers, and even a popular
novelist. This attention is not new; in 1988,
Columbia’s McKissick Museum gathered
interested parties for the first Sweetgrass
Basket Conference to discuss the impact of
modern coastal development on the basketmaking community. The Sweetgrass Preservation Society and the Mount Pleasant
Basketmakers Association grew out of that
conference, as did other preliminary efforts.
Recently, however, promising progress has
been made to ensure the future of the craft.
Nature versus Nurture
The 1988 conference inspired Clemson
biologist Robert Dufault to attempt cultivating large stands of sweetgrass outside its
natural habitat. In the 1990s, he and a
group of about 30 basketmakers planted
fields at McLeod and Dill plantations, but
weed maintenance proved unfeasible without sufficient volunteer support from the
basketmaking community. Karl Ohlandt,
however, has had more recent success cultivating sweetgrass on Dewees Island.
A biologist, horticulturist, and landscape
architect by training, Ohlandt prefers the
term “landscape ecologist.”“I made that up,”
he admits, because standard titles simply
didn’t fit. An unabashed “hard-core plant
guy,” Ohlandt is the landscape manager for
Dewees Island, where he works to preserve
natural plant communities and habitats. A
native of Wadmalaw Island, he grew up
amidst Lowcountry flora. “I always knew
about sweetgrass baskets and appreciated
the basketmaking culture, but I never studied the plant until graduate school,” says
Ohlandt. “The ethnobotany of sweetgrass
intrigues me—the plant plus the sociology
of the basketmaking community.”
By studying the soil and surrounding flora
in natural sweetgrass environments, Ohlandt
Local biologists have begun cultivating patches of sweetgrass throughout the Lowcountry.
The many native and non-native species of sweetgrass display differences in length, color, and texture.
Savannah
Florida
A transplant species
planted by the College
of Charleston
Dewees
Island
Nakia Wigfall’s
cultivated grass
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“Preservingthiscommunity’scultureandits
traditionsisdependent
onanattachmenttothe
landanditsresources.”
Rampant development is impacting the
traditional basketmakers’ stands.
-Patrick Hurley, Political
Science professor at the
College of Charleston
he adds. “Is the difference genetic or environmental? Is there a genetic control for
the quality basketmakers look for?”
One of the native sweetgrass patches cultivated by Karl Ohlandt on Dewees Island
has been able to replicate those conditions
Sweetgrass has become an increasingly popand restore the grass to areas on Dewees,
ular ornamental grass, its lovely purple flowwhere it had disappeared due to developers showing up along roadsides, in home
ment or natural erosion. The plants have
gardens, and in commercial landscapes
done well and propagated, he reports. “My
(including, ironically, the entrances to gated
biggest compliment is when basketmakers
neighborhoods where basketmakers once
say they can’t tell that this grass had been
harvested). Often, however, this grass is
planted.” Unlike many private islands,
heavily fertilized, causing the stems to
resorts, and gated communities that restrict
become dry and brittle, making it difficult
access to sweetgrass habitats,“we invite basfor basketmakers to use. “It’s sweetgrass on
ketmakers to harvest the grass in order to
steroids,” says Wigfall.
help manage and encourage its growth,”
But scientists like Ohlandt and Citadel
explains Ohlandt. The welbiology professor Danny
come is more than appreciatGustafson have other wored, according to Wigfall.
ries about landscaped
“Dewees grass is my favorite,”
sweetgrass. It’s hard to
she says. “It’s strong and
know the species’ origins
coarse and long. It just feels
when ordering from large
right.”
suppliers, and introducing
In addition to nurturing
non-native species can break
sweetgrass on Dewees Island,
down genetic combinations
Ohlandt propagates it in his
that make native plants
John’s Island nursery, hoping
adaptable to local environto expand the native supply
Horticulturist and
ments. Gustafson’s research
available to area landscapers.
biologist Karl Ohlandt
involves looking at Muhlen144
|CHARLESTON
bergia capillaris from different source
species and studying genetic variations in
plants from Texas and South Carolina.
“I’m the only one studying the genetics,”
says Gustafson, who has an experiment
underway on Apron Island off Folly Beach.
“The question is, does it matter where the
plants come from, and if it does, can we
develop some guidelines to help protect
native populations?” Gustafson has taken
sweetgrass from Texas and South Carolina
and planted it in a controlled environment
in order to look for differential performance and identify traits that determine
variation. Thus far, his data indicates that
plants from South Carolina and Texas are
genetically separate species with ecologically important differences.
Basketmakers know this intuitively,
Gustafson notes. “They prefer the texture
and quality of grass growing naturally along
the marsh line to the landscaped varieties,”
he says. “They say, ‘It doesn’t feel right or
smell right, or it’s not strong enough.’ From
a scientific perspective, that’s really cool,”
Grassroots
Management
to the land and its resources,” notes Hurley.
“The Lowcountry is a rich cultural landscape, and many of these places are now
attracting newcomers who aren’t aware of
traditional resources. What will this mean
for the survival of basketmaking, a cultural
icon of Mount Pleasant and Charleston?
What does it mean for the heritage of people who have been here for centuries?”
These same questions lie at the heart of
Mary Alice Monroe’s recent best-selling
novel, Sweetgrass. Monroe weaves a beautiful tale of family identity, loss, and belonging around the metaphor of the sweetgrass
plant. “All my novels have an ecological
bent,” says Monroe, “and I see the threat to
sweetgrass as symbolic of a broader concern. Loss of habitat is a major issue we
face today.Whether it’s nesting areas for sea
turtles or habitats for indigenous grass, the
bigger story is the universal loss of home.”
In the process of researching and writing
Sweetgrass, Monroe developed a deep
appreciation for Mount Pleasant’s basketmakers and their culture. She explored
sweetgrass fields with Karl Ohlandt, took
basketmaking classes, and listened as the
sewers told their stories. In turn, she hopes
her story inspires the broader public to help
preserve this rich heritage. “My role is to
connect people emotionally to these issues,”
says Monroe. “I believe that if we can get
them engaged in the issue, then they will be
more willing to help protect the tradition.”
At the College of Charleston, political science professors Angela Halfacre and Patrick
Hurley are taking a different tack. Their
interest lies in the larger issue of how communities respond to environmental change.
Through interviews with basketmakers,
they are documenting concerns regarding
the scarcity and inaccessibility of sweetgrass and basketmakers’ views and roles in
past and current sweetgrass management.
“We hope to provide documentation about
what has happened and how,” says Hurley.
It takes Nakia Wigfall a long time to sew a
“There is plenty of anecdotal
sweetgrass basket—someevidence, but it hasn’t been
times weeks, sometimes
documented from an academlonger. And it’s taken a long
ic perspective.” According to
time to make the general
Halfacre, assessing the stakepublic aware of issues threatholders’ views will help deterening the future of her craft.
mine how best to encourage
Dale Rosengarten helped
and
incorporate
public
organize the 1988 Sweetgrass
involvement in local environConference and is perhaps
mental decision making.
the leading expert on the his“Preserving this community’s
tory of the craft and local basculture and its traditions is
Biologist Danny
ketmaking culture. A friend
dependent on an attachment
Gustafson
and advocate for basketmak-
A Work in Progress
At a book signing for Mary Alice Monroe’s
novel Sweetgrass, Jeanette Gaillard-Lee of
the Sweetgrass Consortium, Dana Beach
of the Coastal Conservation League, and
Elmore Brown of the African American
Cemetery Fund were on hand to receive
donations to each of their organizations.
ers for more than 20 years, she’s not discouraged by the slow progress in solving
the dwindling grass supply. “I’m amazed so
much is going on right now,” says
Rosengarten. “This is a problem we can
solve. It’s not rocket science, and it’s still
early in the day.The good news is that many
people are becoming aware of the issue.”
Wigfall, too, is encouraged. She is pleased
that the Town of Mount Pleasant has committed to protecting basket stands as part of
the Highway 17 Corridor project. She is also
excited about plans to create a sweetgrass
pavilion at the new waterfront park
beneath the Ravenel Bridge and delighted
by the success of the second annual
Sweetgrass Cultural Arts Festival, held as
part of Piccolo Spoleto last June. While she
encourages her two children to pursue
their dreams (her daughter wants to be an
aerospace engineer and her son a cardiothorasic surgeon), she also teaches them
how to sew sweetgrass baskets, just as her
mother taught her. But in the long run, will
these efforts be enough? When Nona
Bennett, a basketmaker in Mary Alice
Monroe’s novel, is asked a similar question,
she answers:
“I don’t know…. But I do know we can’t
just give up on it. We’re passing on tradition…. There’s too much at stake for the
future generations to just let it all go.
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