The Natchez Democrat

ROXIE &045; This sleepy town doesn’t have much in the way of business anymore. Most of the residents leave each morning to work somewhere else.

East and West Boulevards, where most of the stores and the post office and city hall are located, doesn’t have much going on these days.

&uot;Roxie used to be a flourishing little town,&uot; Robert Brown, a longtime resident of Roxie, said. &uot;But we lost Georgia Pacific and that really hurt.&uot;

But several hundred people still make their homes here and more than a few of them have some of the loveliest gardens around.

Mary Brown’s pride and joy these days is her garden, which takes up most of two acres behind the house where she and her husband live.

She grows an astounding variety of flowers, vegetables and fruit-bearing trees, neatly divided into several sections.

&uot;Every yard has to have a focal point and this is mine,&uot; Mary said, pointing to the wishing fountain made from an old concrete culvert and a hand water pump that was once her grandmother’s.

Brown eagerly shows off her flower garden, just next to the house, and the vegetables &045; tomatoes, butterbeans, snap peas, squash, cucumbers, okra, peppers and corn &045; a little further back, next to the fruit trees, which include pears, plums, mayhaws and figs.

There are three rows worth of muscadine grapes, which the Browns eat raw and their youngest son Craig uses to make muscadine wine. And throughout the garden are blueberry bushes with their fruit ready to pick right now.

&uot;This is our hobby. It’s just that our hobby is a lot of work,&uot; Mary said.

Mary’s flowers come in all shapes and sizes, and she once had 172 colors of day lilies.

&uot;I just love butterflies,&uot; she said. &uot;I’ll grow anything if it will help bring butterflies to the garden.

Robert does a fair amount of the labor in the garden, though Mary spent all of Thursday morning in the garden. Robert also makes, along with son Craig, most of the sculptures and structures in the area.

There’s a table made from old mule-cart wheels that their ancestors owned that Mary said a man offered $500 dollars for, but she declined.

&uot;I told him there’s no price tag on it,&uot; Mary said. &uot;That’s our history, and you just can’t sell it.

Mary was Miss Roxie in 1962, the year before Roxie’s High School was closed down and combined into Franklin County High School in Meadville, a few miles down Highway 84.

Craig works offshore for ExxonMobil, but he’s building himself a house from the ground up just across the street from his parents.

&uot;His walkway leads right up to his mama’s, you notice,&uot; Mary said. &uot;That’s so he can come over for dinner anytime he wants.&uot;