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Bland Simpson is Kenan Distinguished Professor of English and creative writing at UNC-Chapel Hill. His amazing talents have awed fellow North Carolinians for years. His music compositions and performances have charmed audiences in New York and throughout the world. He has written about North Carolina people and history and has entertained and enlightened its readers.

His writings set in our coastal areas have taught us about our home state. But his latest book, “Clover Garden: A Carolinian’s Piedmont Memoir,” takes readers far away from the coast and brings them to where Simpson lives much of the time in Clover Garden.
Clover Garden, is a small, four-square-mile community in the old Porter track of the lower Old Fields, lying beside the Haw River a few miles west of Chapel Hill and Carrboro, North Carolina, where Simpson writes, “patches of contoured red-clay furrows in southwest Orange County in the state’s foothills, growing corn and soybeans and hay and winter wheat, though once also cotton and tobacco, alongside dairy cows, beeves, and horses in pastures meeting deep forests of white oaks and red oaks and pines, copses of them around country churches, and straight-up to poplars and high-crown hickories, American beech and always sweet gum, muscadine vines everywhere, willows close to the water lines of ponds where big blue herons stalk and hunt, ponds full of bass and bream, shellcrackers and pumpkin seed and catfish prowling the bottoms, and dogwood and redbud fringing the woods with white and a pinkish lavender in early spring —all the waters of these lands draining away (often just after the rains have revealed Indian points and potsherds in our gardens, ironic intended gifts of the natives, the first peoples) into the dendritic headquarters of the Cape Fear River and, after flowing 200 miles, out past Oak Island and Bald Head to Frying Pan Shoals where Long Bay and Onslow Bay meet and form the Atlantic Ocean.”
Simpson turns the discussion back to Clover Garden and one of the community’s most famous residents, Eben Merritt, who owned the neighborhood service station.
Merritt, had just enough edge and authority to be referred to as ‘the captain’ and addressed, by one and all entering the station as, ‘Cap’n.’ ”
Cap’n Merritt was thought to be both notoriously miserly (he kept anything anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand in cash rolled up in the big pocket of his overalls and at least once paid $25,000 in cash for a dump truck to a heavy equipment dealer who thought Merritt was only a poor country bumpkin wandering into the showroom just to gaze at the big shiny machines) and famously generous (he kept many a family, without regard to race, fed and in their homes with well-timed loans when they were in need, and, further he kept up with who owed him and what and did not worry over it much.
Mr. Merritt’s son Wyndell and I were classmates at Davidson. At Thanksgiving in our freshman year, he invited me to spend the holiday with his family in Chapel Hill.
Mr. Merritt and his friends were expert hunters, and they allowed us to join them for their planned turkey hunt. I thought it would be great if I could down a turkey and take it home for my mother to cook.
But Mr. Merritt and his friends were very quick, and they downed two or three turkeys before I could raise my gun to eye level. Wyndell knew I was disappointed and took me down to a creek where I shot a squirrel. When I took it home after the weekend, my mother ordered me to throw it away.
Years later, when I was able to tell people that I had been turkey hunting with Eben Merritt, I got attention I did not deserve.
Bland Simpson’s new book and the lovely photos by his wife, Ann Cary Simpson, will give its readers a similar opportunity to experience life in Clover Garden.

D.G. Martin, a retired lawyer, served as UNC-System’s vice president for public affairs and hosted PBS-NC’s “North Carolina Bookwatch.”