With her characteristic warmth and good humor, Celestine Sibley invites us into her garden at Sweet Apple, the 1848 log cabin that her readers grew to know through Sibley’s many columns and books about her life there.

While sharing her experiences with gardening, she weaves rich images of friends and loved ones into the narrative of her adventures in learning about the land and nature. Her subjects are commonplace and timeless—the experience of beginning a garden and the work it involves; the joys of growing your own vegetables; the challenges of the compost pile and a bewildering variety of garden insects; and the endless delights of flower arranging.

Sibley does not prescribe guidelines on gardening so much as she describes in amusing detail the trails and frustrations as well as the enormous satisfaction of gardening. As Sibley says, “It’s not what you grow that makes you a rich and successful gardener…. The doing is the thing.” Likewise, it’s not the subjects that make this book so endearing—it’s Celestine’s observations on them.

This is a collection of personal essays on gardening for readers who love to garden, no matter how fruitful—or fruitless—their efforts.

Sweet Apple—the very name evokes a rural charm. That’s what Celestine Sibley discovered on her initial visit to the primitive log cabin built in 1844. And that’s what she continued to find after many years living in the house, lovingly restores and filled with the memories of her own family’s life there.

“How an old abandoned house can take hold of a reasonably sane woman’s heart, fill her mind, lap up her energy and change her life is still something of a mystery to me,” Sibley muses. By the time you have savored her tale of restoring the old house, Sweet Apple’s charm will no longer be a mystery. The dilapidated ruin into which Sibley invested her heart and energy became a community project and Sibley and her family grew to love the colorful and interesting lifestyle of their neighborhood.

This is far more, however, than a story about breathing new life into an old house and moving from the city to the country. It is a story of personal discovery and fulfillment laced with wry humor and good common sense. Sibley’s vision of living and loving is so clear, so pure, that no reader can put down this book without feeling enriched. The sampling of Southern recipes that she has collected here are also certain to delight.

One of the joys of Celestine Sibley’s writing is the people she tells us about. That’s because “Celestine’s People,” whether fictitious or otherwise, are always real – the kind of individuals you’d like to sit down with and have a long conversation. This has never been truer than with the characters who populate Christmas In Georgia.

Take for example, sightless Mrs. Tippen: “She was a funny looking old thing in her bunchy black clothes, hopping about on the doorstep like a tame crow, but she was good.” And there is Mrs. Tippen’s friend, ten-year-old Sukey Hart, who knew how to do almost everything – from spinning and weaving to speaking perfect Cherokee – except how to keep her young heart from listening when she heard a wounded Tory soldier tell about his Christmases back in England before the Revolutionary War.

There’s no one you’ll remember more than Henry Grady Huckaby, who, out of love for his sick brother, accidentally saved Christmas for his entire family. Or take cranky, rheumatoid-ridden Gramp Stanton, who makes Christmas come, even to Snout Island. Or get to know adolescent Araminta Morley, who, though “just the age to be cynical, even at Christmastime,” will touch your heart and fill you with the holiday spirit.

The stories here take place on Southern soil. But their themes and their characters are as universal as Christmas itself. They’re the kinds of stories that families and friends will cherish and read alound to one another every holiday season – year after year.

Celestine Sibley tells us why mothers are always special. But don’t expect to find only silver-haired saints and paragons of maternal virtue in this volume. The women (and sometimes men) Celestine writes about are honest people confronting everyday problems. They are frequently strong-willed, occasionally unorthodox, and generally free-spirited people who do the best they can with what’s at hand. And they always do it with a tremendous sustaining power of love.

In Mothers Are Always Special, you’ll meet people like Sarah McClendon Murphy, who opens her arms, her home, and her heart to hundreds of orphaned and abandoned children. You’ll meet courageous Montell Purcell, who—when told her five-year-old daughter must lose her sight or her life—waits out the doctors and their diagnoses until a miracle occurs. You’ll be introduced to Joe and Horace, an unlikely pair who correct, cajole, protect, and mother a brood of five boys after their parents’ deaths, and who do so as lovingly as any woman could. And you’ll never forget doe-like Cora Purefoy, the sixteen-year-old mountain woman who mistakenly sells her baby and then fights to get him back.

With such stories, Celestine Sibley reminds us that no matter what the age, sex, or background of the person who loves a child, Mothers Are Always Special.