Remembering Clarence Jones
Frank Clarence Jones, the man behind most of the azaleas, camellias and countless other flowers that adorn Orton Plantation Gardens, died Friday, November 7, at New Hanover Regional Medical Center in Wilmington. He was 100 years old.
Two months prior to his centennial birthday on August 8, Jones was interviewed and featured in the June 4 edition of The State Port Pilot.
All roads lead to Orton
For 99-year-old Clarence Jones, career, love and leisure all began within the garden gates
By Jonathan Spiers
Staff Writer
Walking among the gardens of Orton Plantation, Clarence Jones strolls slowly, step-by-step, wooden cane in hand. Two months shy of turning 100, he takes his time, watching his steps along the paths.
Despite the deceleration of age, he may very well prefer this speed, as it affords him time to notice nearly every flower he passes, every azalea and every camellia, all tucked within finely trimmed hedges under awnings of live oaks.
“Aren’t they pretty?” he asks sincerely, just as any visitor might at first sight. Yet Jones is no visitor. The tone of his question hints of well-earned pride. Passing by a bed of impatiens, he predicts another two weeks before hydrangeas start blooming. Gardenias thereafter.
He’s seen these flowers many times over. In fact, he’s responsible for almost all of them, having planted innumerable blooms in his time as a gardener at Orton. His lifetime, more accurately, as Jones has rarely strayed from what has been his second home for nearly a century.
Even after seven decades working here, Jones is no less enamored by the allure of the historic rice plantation-turned-gardens. He still notices the flowers, overlooking not one of them, taking none for granted. They represent his life’s work.
“It’s beautiful,” he says.
Come August 8, the day he becomes a centenarian, the folks at Orton Plantation Gardens will be honoring their beloved associate by declaring it Clarence Jones Appreciation Month, complete with a family reunion and celebration befitting a man who, with his quick wit and wealth of stories, personifies Orton then and now.
“I suppose he’s planted more azaleas and camellias than any man in North Carolina ever has,” said his friend and longtime employer Laurence Sprunt, owner of Orton. “He’s quite an entertainer if you let him. If you get him started, don’t stop him, because something will come out that’s pretty darn good. He’s a wonderful source of history.”
That history goes back to when Orton was still a working plantation. His mother worked there before him, and a teenaged Jones went to work tending to rice fields along the bank of the Cape Fear River.
Sitting on a bench within sight of those fields, he appears stoic, his soft blue eyes peering out toward the foliage surrounding him. Clutching his cane between his knees, he animates his stories with the occasional lift of his voice, stretch of his arms or wave of his hands. Those hands — they draw the eyes, commanding attention, defined and toughened by years of work with tools and soil.
“Born and raised in this area,” he starts. “Chopping rice was the number-one priority at that time. I made a little bit of money, not much. Some of my relatives worked here. We had a lot of people working who were in the family, and a lot of them wasn’t. Anybody could get a job here.”
By the 1930s, rice fields gave way to a garden and nursery, where Jones received tutorials in the art of cultivating flowers and propagating blooms, despite knowing little to nothing of the practice previously.
“No, not a whole lot. But I like flowers,” he says. “You cherish the things that you like. And I had a nice teacher, Churchill Bragaw. He took a great interest in me, that I could do more.”
For a couple hours the occasional evening, Bragaw, a longtime horticulturist at the gardens, took Jones into the greenhouse to teach him tricks of the trade.
“We were both single, so you didn’t have to rush home to your wife,” Jones says with a smile. “I never went to a whole lot of school, but I was very easy to catch on. He taught me lots of things. I missed him very much when he died.”
In his years at Orton, Jones was involved in propagating several breeds of flowers, including one that bears his name, the Clarence Jones camellia, which he describes as an off-shade pink, imbricate bloom, meaning the petals overlap to form a spiral.
“I said, ‘Great day, look at that!’ I got down on my knees and graft it,” he says. “We took them to a flower show, didn’t get a blue ribbon. You know how that goes. If you had one that big, you got a ribbon. I didn’t have one that big, but I had a gorgeous bloom.”
Telling this story, Jones attracts a small crowd of garden visitors, who appear to realize his stories’ significance. Within seconds, Jones becomes Orton’s top tourist attraction.
Over the years, Jones offered his landscaping services to others, as well. He reports to have planted the first flower in Boiling Spring Lakes while landscaping the first house ever built there when the city was developed in the early 1960s. He also planted a line of live oaks beside Southport Marina. But he always returned to Orton.
“Orton’s been a very pleasant place to work,” he says. “The Sprunts have been very nice people to work for. The foremen are nice people to work with. I’ve enjoyed it up to this very day.”
These days, Jones visits Orton once a week, consulting with gardeners and staff while providing some comic relief. David Sprunt, Laurence’s son, said Jones’ wealth of knowledge of the plantation’s history has proven invaluable.
“I remember him when I was a kid. He had tamed a mockingbird that was eating out of his hand,” he said. “When he worked in the gardens, he talked to visitors and made their day, telling old stories. He’s still got a pretty good memory when it comes to all that stuff.
“He’s totally entwined with Orton. Anything related to why things were in the gardens, to be able to go to him and have him as a historical resource is priceless. The property’s been in our family for 125 years. It has a lot of sentimental value for us. Without having him here to explain the past and as a friend, there’d be lots of holes in our story.”
The history of the Jones family, too, has much history that begins with Orton. Jones met his late wife, Evelina, at the plantation and proposed to her in the gardens atop a stairway facing the river. A wedding in 1931 preceded about 80 years of marriage, five children and, eventually, about as many great-grandchildren.
Now living alone in Dark Branch, an area just north of Orton along N.C. 133, Jones keeps himself occupied with several activities. Orton staff members visit him regularly, and he still drives a car, taking an occasional trip to Wilmington or Southport during daylight hours.
Of his days away from Orton, Jones says, “Sometimes good, sometimes bad. I get lonesome. Sometimes I read a book. I’ve got a fish pool, three bird feeders. My porch faces both of them. I’ve got some flowers I enjoy looking at every day. I watch the cars go by and trucks go by, breaks up the monotony. Sometimes I turn on my Dictaphone and dance.”
With two months left before his age reaches the rarity of triple digits, Jones takes the achievement in stride.
“Chip off the old block don’t fall far,” he explains with a smile. “My sister lived 102 years. My aunt lived to be 90. My mother died in her 80s. We all was a little bit on the long lifespan. I think about it occasionally, but I never try to let it get to me. The preacher was preaching, ‘One day at a time’ — you know what today is, but tomorrow you can’t tell. You don’t know what’s going to happen.”
Looking back on his long life, Jones imparts some lessons to live by.
“You have ups and downs, you never live on the level. Some days up and some days down.
“You don’t worry about the bad; you think about the good. One thing I did, I got along with everybody. To get along with people is one of the greatest things in the world.
“Have a good time all the time.”
As for what gardening has taught him about life, “Enjoying what you’re doing,” Jones says. “If you don’t enjoy what you’re doing, don’t do it. I enjoy working in the nursery, I like to watch flowers grow, I like to propagate flowers — anything you can do in the flowering business. And anything new you can find — every day is something new.”
With that, Jones rises from the bench to head back through the gardens, helped by his friend, Charlotte Murchison, the office manager at Orton, who calls him “Mr. Clarence.” Once on his feet, a mother and daughter touring the gardens greet him with early happy birthday wishes. Jones receives them graciously.
“I hope you all enjoy the garden,” Jones responds, “and then be sure to come back for the birthday party.”
He asks where they live, and the woman says Cincinnati, Ohio, explaining that she’s visiting her mother in Boiling Spring Lakes.
“Boiling Springs? Got a lot of alligators,” he replies with a smirk. As if giving her a local’s fair warning, he adds, “You can’t take them up to Cincinnati. They won’t survive.
“Alligator steak? Woo! You can’t beat it,” he declares. “When you start eating alligator steak, you’ll forget about the law.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” the woman says, giving him a hug.
Sporting a sly smile, surrounded by the gardens he knows by heart, Jones looks at his friend.
“Miss Charlotte,” he says, “I think I’ll stay here.”