Before I knew better, I devoured Gone with the Wind. As a preteen, I’d stay up all night reading it under the covers with a flashlight, then start over again to best my time. I watched it on the big screen every chance I got. I blame GWTW for my lifelong yearning to visit southern plantations in the full flower of spring. Perhaps the hoop skirts would be gone, but the rhododendrons, azaleas, dogwood, magnolia–they’d be magnificent!
“You could take the special tours set up from the point of view of slaves,” my friends who had gone on Civil Rights tours helpfully suggested. (This was when we all said “slaves” instead of “enslaved people.”) Of course I would do that, too, but I wanted the full-on Tara experience. Again, minus the hoop skirts and the enslaved people.
I confessed my guilty wish to my friend Lisa. Disgusted, she said, “Why don’t you just visit Filoli instead?”
Filoli is a 645-acre estate just a bit south of San Francisco. It was originally built in 1917 as a private residence for William Bourn, who controlled the Empire Mine and San Francisco Gas Company, orchestrating a merger that became Pacific Gas and Electric. According to Wikipedia, Bourn’s investment in a water company bought by San Francisco led the San Francisco Chronicle to regularly pillory him as a thief and scoundrel for water rates,
But at least the man didn’t enslave people. The name Filoli, the website explains, is derived from the first two letters from the key words of Bourn’s personal credo:
Fight for a just cause.
Love your fellow man.
Live a good life
Not bad for a rich guy described as a “socialite and entrepreneur.” In fact, the website rather hilariously features a Land Acknowledgment (the estate is “situated on the unceded ancestral lands of the Ramaytush Ohlone,” and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion language is plastered all over the “About” page.
Since Filoli can best be described as a lovely destination for the Ladies Who Lunch crowd, this seems a bit much. But again, at least it’s not Tara. And the owners after the Bourns included an avid gardener whose family bequeathed the estate to the public in 1975.
So I’ve taken Lisa’s advice, and tried to mitigate years of mainlining plantation propaganda by visiting Filoli. Recently I even got a membership. Since Filoli was slammed by the drought and pandemic (and because those Ladies Who Lunch are of an age when they keep dying), they’ve gone all out to entice new members with huge discounts.
Now Filoli’s my go-to place. Last week the roses were in full bloom:
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There’s even a dogwood in full bloom for those of us with that southern yearning:
