You might ask, "Where have all the flowers gone?" if you could see what's left of them at Augusta's once-fabulous botanical gardens. But you can't because they're behind locked gates that the Georgia Golf Hall of Fame won't open because of insurance liability issues.

But it's just as well. Most of the flowers, shrubs, bushes and small trees behind the serpentine brick wall in the gardens in the Georgia Golf Hall of Fame Botanical Gardens are dead. Roses in the Rose Garden. Azaleas in the Azalea garden. Even the Grand Lawn doesn't look so grand anymore. And millions of taxpayers' dollars that went to plant and maintain the gardens have just disappeared like the butterflies in the burned-up butterfly garden.

How did this happen, you ask?

Politics and bureaucracy with probably a little spite, for good measure.

After Gov. Sonny Perdue cut off the Hall of Fame's funding this year, the authority that runs the facility laid off the gardeners and cut off the water. That was in mid-July in the teeth of our record drought.

The Hall of Fame's marketing director Robyn Jarrett said the authority that oversees the facilities had no choice because they had no money. The city volunteered to take over the gardens and operate them as a public park, but it took Mayor Deke Copenhaver six weeks to negotiate an agreement with the Golf Hall of Fame Board of Directors. It took another eight weeks for the agreement to make its way through three state government agencies and back to the commission. And there's one more hurdle to go: the Board of Directors, but they don't meet for three more weeks.

Mayor Copenhaver said it's been "extremely frustrating." He said the city has tried to help but without the signed agreement there's nothing he can do.

Ms. Jarrett said the city could have watered the gardens but didn't offer.

The mayor said he thought the agreement was imminent after commissioners signed off the first time Aug. 21.

At Tuesday's meeting, where commissioners approved the agreement for the second time, Commissioner Andy Cheek asked whether he was wrong in assuming that the Golf Hall of Fame is in complete neglect of preserving the property.

"I will tell you, you can decide how you want to phrase that, but it's been a very frustrating process, I would say that, " the mayor replied.

POOR RICHARD'S ALMANAC: I was talking to Richard Noegel, our former writing coach here at The Chronicle, the other day about something he wrote a few years back about the Yazoo Fraud. He said he wrote a 30-page, single-spaced article on it - with footnotes. I said I'd like to read the short version, without the footnotes. So the next thing you know, there it was in my e-mail, the short version written in Richard's most entertaining style, which I plan to share with you. Only problem is even the abbreviated version is too long, so it will have to be in installments.

But before the first installment, I have to tell you about Richard, who has worked as a civilian employee of the U.S. Air Force Intelligence Service as a specialist in Middle East and African Affairs and as a German, Arabic and French linguist. If I was as smart as he is, my head would explode. And I have to tell you about why he wrote Yazoo. It was the bicentennial anniversary of the corrupt Georgia Legislature's outrageous sale of 35 million acres of the state's land. Another motivation was a reaction to politicians saying how we need to restore "civility" to our political discourse. Well, Richard says, if you read newspapers of the 18th and 19th centuries, you'll see that politicians then fought duels and got into brawls.

"Fistfights, I mean, and insulted one another in public speech and in writing. And their constituents were perfectly willing and ready to kill them if they were corrupt or stupid," he said. "So one of the reasons for my writing that piece was to tell people of today that today's politics are as civil as Mary Poppins at a Sunday School picnic compared to what used to go on as a matter of course."

Richard says political "debate" today is insipid.

"It's just a bunch of old women talking about anything but what really matters," he said, to which I say, "Watch it, Richard!"

YAZOO, CHAPTER ONE: "At the end of the Revolution, Georgia was the largest state in the new Republic, just as it is today the largest state east of the Mississippi. The period after the Revolution was a turbulent, heady time, just as things always are anywhere after a revolution. So the whole country was chock-full of speculators. Land was wealth in those days, and Georgia had more land than any other state. But she had the smallest population, so most of Georgia in 1795 was not settled. Georgia included almost everything that is now Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. The Yazoo River was in northwestern Georgia (now northern Mississippi).

"So, speculators from all over came to Augusta (the capital until 1796) and bribed the members of the General Assembly to get them to vote to sell Georgia's public domain to private buyers for a penny an acre. So the General Assembly, thus corrupted, sold off tens of millions of acres of public land to private companies that had been formed for this nefarious purpose.

"Well, such a thing cannot be a secret, of course, so word of the bribery and corruption and criminal sale of the people's land spread like wildfire throughout Georgia, and the people were ab-so-lutely outraged. So lynch mobs formed in nearly half the counties in the state, and they set out to hang the corrupt legislators. That happened in Burke County, Hancock County, Oglethorpe County, Columbia County and others.

"In Hancock County, the mob decided to tie their state senator Robards Thomas to a sapling and whip him publicly for his corruption.

"Sen. Thomas wisely high-tails it to South Carolina. But one of his constituents follows him there, finds him sitting alone in a cabin and shoots him.

"The sight of Sen. Thomas' death agony traumatized his killer so 'he returned home, shut himself up in a dark room from intercourse with the world for 18 years, begging as if for his own life, that God would pardon him for taking the life of another.'

"In Oglethorpe County, the lynch mob got right up to their representative Sen. Musgrove's house, - and a simple public whipping was not part of their plan. They *meant* to hang the SOB from the nearest tree. And they would have, too, except that somebody forewarned the legislator, and he got away with his life. He had to leave Georgia and go into permanent exile as did many of the legislators who had been corrupted by the bribes.

"The governor, George Matthews, was obliged to leave Georgia as an exile for the rest of his life."

(To be continued)

Reach Sylvia Cooper at (706) 823-3228 or sylvia.cooper@augustachronicle.com.