Credit: Judson McCrainie, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons, aka Bubba 73.
Great gardens are not always a result of landscape architecture degrees from Harvard or of vast wealth. Instead, a good head, desire to learn, a knack for design, and a willingness to work very, very hard can produce superb results. This was underscored in the “Gardens” page post for Eudora Welty’s home, and the idea is also played out at South Carolina’s Pearl Fryar Topiary Garden.
Unlike other sites discussed on the SGHS website, the amazing work displayed here does not span a great number of decades, actually having its beginnings in 1984, just two years after the birth of the Southern Garden History Society. Its genesis, moreover, comes from one North Carolina native, the son of sharecropper who had begun his career in New York City before taking a Bishopville Coca-Cola Company job in 1975. Facing racial stereotypes about African American housescapes, Fryar achieved his first gardening success by winning the town’s “Yard of the Month” award, having demonstrated his keen knack for making the most from the least by using discarded garden center plants.
The transition from the coveted-yard stage to a garden deserving international fame began in the late 80s as Fryar started to shape some of his evergreen plants into an increasing variety of forms beyond their normal growth habits. Such practices, of course, have been applied in gardens around the world for millennia, coming into fashion and fading out again at various intervals. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, for example, crafting evergreen plants into shapes ranging from the simple to the wildly creative gained wide acceptance across Europe and Great Britain. With the expanding popularity of naturalistic landscapes, however, topiary work came to be viewed as antiquated or even silly, being put up for ridicule by eighteenth-century observers such as Alexander Pope. Yet, every dog will have his day, or perhaps yet another day, and by the late nineteenth century shrubs crafted into dogs, cats, rabbits and an infinite variety of other fantastic configurations had again found their place in the sun.
Visitors can find worthy American examples at such sites as Pennsylvania’s Longwood Topiary Garden or Ladew Topiary Gardens in Maryland, where topiary riders follow topiary hounds and an evergreen fox in a forever-frozen bushy chase. While displaying amazing works of greenery art, however, neither of these spots carry the unique sense of direct bond between the plant and the hands-on gardener as awed Society members discovered during the 2009 Camden, SC, meeting, this being the final stop on the Sunday tour.
A three-acre site carved from a cornfield, Pearl Fryar’s garden grew out of a dedication that meant he would work for Coca-Cola all day and shape his shrubs by headlights into the night. When asked about the nature of his efforts, instead of referring to his “topiary art,” Fryar typically replied, “I cut up bushes.” His “bushes” and trees in turn, have enthralled thousands of visitors with their tremendous variety of forms and sizes, many of which required Fryar adept manipulation of a chain saw while perched precariously atop a twelve-foot step ladder or a lift. In describing her experience at the Fryar garden, one guest noted “you can feel some kind of spirit within it.” That spirit might be best said in the living words shaped in his front lawn: “Love” “Peace” “&” “Goodwill.”
A pinnacle came in 2006 when Fryar’s work was celebrated in the full-length documentary, A Man Named Pearl.* In more recent years, however, the garden began to decline with Fryar facing health issues that can come with age. Fortunately, other individuals and organizations stepped in to ensure that his topiary legacy continued, the garden now given further interest by the introduction of various hardscape items. Initial aid came from a nonprofit Friends groups, along with the Garden Conservancy. Additional grants brought a new generation of topiary talent to Fryar’s garden in the person of Ohio native Mike Gibson, who now operates his own Columbia, SC, business, Gibson Works, LLC.
Now, a new nonprofit organization, the Pearl Fryar Topiary Garden, Inc., is helping to guide the garden’s future, its mission being to preserve “the artistic and horticultural legacy Pearl Fryar,” and to make sure the property remains in use for both the education and entertainment of the public.* Long into the future, therefore, visitors to Fryar’s garden can experience horticultural art that was just as appreciated by Julius Caesar and Queen Elizabeth Tudor as it is by us today.
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*For the trailer for A Man Named Pearl, see: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0878134/
For more on the Fryar Garden and preservation efforts there, visit: https://www.pearlfryargarden.org/
See also:
https://southerngardenhistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Magnolia-fallwinter20072008.pdf#page=14
https://southerngardenhistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Magnolia_winter_2008_2009.pdf#page=15
On Harvey Ladew’s topiary, visit: https://ladewgardens.com/Visit-Ladew/Gardens-History
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