The Interview
Warren Schultz
By John Koch, Boston Globe
Can you tell someone's gender by looking at his or her garden?
Yes. Some of the clues and cues are a vegetable garden, a large lawn that is finely maintained or a finely trimmed hedge, or straight rows - that would be a guy. For a woman, it's more free-form, more pastel and muted colors, a little more trendy. A guy's garden is much more straightforward. Big things, bright colors. I hate to get in trouble, but one of the characteristics of guys' gardens is that they're more fun. One of the things we all tried to do, unless we lived in the city, was play outdoors in the dirt and mud. This is what guys try to get back to in the garden. Where else do we get to do that?
Have you been chided for political incorrectness?
I haven't felt the backlash from this book yet, but I did from the previous one [A Man's Turf], because it glorified the whole lawn thing as a man's self-expression. I related back to learning how to mow the lawn with my father. It was almost sacred.
What prompted you to write about men's gardens?
A lot of it was my upbringing. I come from a family of farmers, and I was a farmer myself. I grew up on a truck farm in upstate New York. Being in the garden-writing business for the past 20 years, I saw that the plain men's gardens, good as they are, did not get a lot of attention. They were kind of scorned. On a deeper level, it comes from just growing up on a farm, where growing plants is a very masculine thing to do. A lot of my guy friends wonder what I'm doing out there in the garden - "Hey, let's go shoot hoops or a round of golf." For them, it's kind of sissified. The book [it examines 15 gardens nationwide] is a reaction against that. I wondered, what about the old-fashioned guy who gardens? There are millions, and I thought somebody should write about them. The men I wrote about were ordinary guys who followed their own visions.
Like the guy who trained plants to spell out a tribute to Diet Pepsi?
Pearl Friar. He lives in Beaumont, South Carolina. He's possessed, like someone who's had a religious experience. He's an older black guy and works on a line in a can factory for a living. He transformed his yard into a topiary zoo, not the normal animals and cones and balls, but these visions he has while he's working in the factory. He goes home, he has spotlights in his yard, and works all night. What got me was that he said he didn't know that what he was doing had a name, and he did not know that anyone had done this before. It wasn't until some college horticulturalist heard about his garden, and came to see him, and said, "Oh, great topiary." Then he started reading books, and he found that just messed him up. He had to forget about all that and just get out there with the plants and start cutting away.
How about your own garden?
I recently moved to an old ranch house, so I'm starting one. There was a little bit of foundation planting and some beds right in front of the house. I'm going to do what I've done in the past, and that is put in vegetables. Lettuce, tomatoes, herbs. It's the perfect place, right there at the door.
Is this a manly plan?
I think it is. It's a guy thing to plant vegetables in your front flower bed, but then again, it's also a guy thing to put them out back in a big rectangle. It's a little radical to put them in front, a statement that you can do whatever you want in your own damn yard.
How organically do you live? Give yourself a grade.
I would give myself a B-minus. Outdoors, I'm totally organic. Indoors, well, I use bleach in the wash [a no-no in the upcoming The Organic Suburbanite], but I recycle like crazy. I try to use natural cleaning products whenever possible. Vinegar and baking soda are the best. The whole point of this book is that a lot of the things are easy and can be done by the average suburbanite. You can disinfect your pool water with something other than chlorine. You can be careful about how you maintain your car. The most damaging thing you can do for the environment is buy a new car, because of all the material that goes into it and all the pollution that comes out of the process of manufacturing a car. People don't understand the hazards of what they're doing. I've had so many arguments about pesticides. We've been told they're safe, but they're poisons. Many of them have been banned, but by now they're in the food chain, in the soil and the water.
What's your favorite thing to do in the garden?
Just mowing the lawn. It's kind of a meditative act. You're doing the same repetitive task, there's the roaring in your ears, and it transports me back to my youth and what was going on then.
What's your big dream?
Over the past month or so, I've been thinking maybe I can go back and buy the family farm, which was sold since my father died. I'd sort of retire into a little business, like a nursery, and run the family farm, and get back to my roots. The tug is very strong. It's why, as an adult, I mainly do garden writing. It's my way of doing what my father did and doing my own thing at the same time. It might bring a sense of peace.
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