Like most outsiders, I arrived in the  verdant city of Savannah with a dog-eared copy of John Berendt’s best seller Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil tucked under my arm. But unlike most outsiders, I also carried a few more things: a two-year-old child, a suitcase filled with all my worldly belongings, and the name of an ancestor buried in Johnson Square.

I was a Mason-Dixon child, a perpetual misfit. The child of a Yankee dad and a Southern mama who eventually seceded from the Union. I summered in Charleston, South Carolina, and wintered in the Bronx, New York: a fatal fault in timing that enabled me to experience the worst of both worlds. After a fine Southern education at Davidson College and a poor Yankee attempt at marriage, I chose Savannah, a small city I’d visited only in Berendt’s book, as a place to start over.

Underneath the demure mantle of Spanish moss, I met doting stay-at-home moms who pushed park swings with one hand and sipped highballs from the other. I spent an excellent wine dinner shooting alley rats with an air rifle. I deflected both evangelical advances and romantic innuendos from the same married man on the same evening.

Gardens Everywhere
This ambivalent eden has been a fresh start for misfits since 1733. That’s when social reformer James Oglethorpe rounded up a motley crew of debtors and paupers—people desperate enough to risk serving as the colonies’ first line of defense against Florida’s Spanish armies—arranged them on a grid of landscaped squares flanking the river, and called them Georgia, the thirteenth colony.

On my first day in lucky number thirteen, I followed an ordered row of squares to become the carriage-house tenant of a character from Midnight. As we sealed the deal over a box of cheap wine in the trunk of the learned gentleman’s Lincoln, I discovered that Savannah has no linear sense of time. An eighty-five-year-old and a twenty-something have the same wry wit and reckless generosity. The same circle of friends. The same impermeable liver.

“The garden” remains deeply rooted in Oglethorpe’s original city plan. Twenty-one of the primordial shady squares partner with dozens of lush parks and promenades to parcel modern urban life into genial strolls. It’s a sustainable plan that defies sprawl and encourages the oldest form of transportation. In a former pirate haven famous for flouting Prohibition, meandering is made all the more agreeable by an “alfresco” alcohol policy that culminates each year in the world’s third largest Saint Patrick’s Day celebration. (While we’re on the subject, the party is most certainly not on River Street, where multitudes of very inebriated people stand shoulder to shoulder with green beer in hands. Instead, camp out on Bull Street at Chippewa Square for a long, lazy day of celebrating with the locals.)

Talking Progress
For all its tough and twisted roots, Savannah is blooming in unexpected ways. In the fastest growing port in the nation, cargo ships larger than city blocks tower over the bluff and keep the historic horizon on the move. Lush live oaks and antebellum architecture harbor scores of independent cafés and bars, trend-conscious boutiques, and cutting-edge galleries. Favorite haunts include the bustling Cate Lyon Studio, a celebrated custom clothier whose new fashion label, Hant Blu, is named after the traditional color we paint our ceilings to ward off evil; and the Wright Square Café, where Parisian truffles and fresh lunches create an intimate, tell-all atmosphere.

Inside these character-rich establishments, progress is the talk of the town. Savannah’s Big Dig, the rescue mission to reclaim Ellis Square from its dreary internment as a cement parking garage, is nearly complete, so it’s finally safe to get a cold one at the nearby Rail without an earful of rumors about misread water tables and unearthed skeletons.

But there’s plenty of mudslinging whenever the subject of dredging the Savannah River arises. The dredging would make room for supertankers and further economic growth. This key debate is mired in environmental studies aimed at determining how best to protect Savannah’s marsh ecosystems from murky runoff.

At the Gryphon Tea Room and Gallery Espresso, amateur art collectors look for inside tips on emerging artists whose affordable student work, bought straight from the studio, may one day triple in value. We owe this favorite pastime to the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD), a progressive institution woven seamlessly throughout our small city. SCAD leads the nation in a diverse array of disciplines, from Interactive Design and Game Development to Historic Preservation—along with a renegade minor in Equestrian Studies.

To escape the scuttlebutt, visit General Oglethorpe’s experimental Trustees’ Garden—the first of its kind in America—which is now blossoming into an organic farmers’ market and teaching center for sustainable agriculture. Gardeners and cooks make their weekly pilgrimage here on Wednesday nights for fresh, local produce.

Oh, and there’s one unspoken rule among Savannahians: Only tourists mention Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil in public.