A man named Pearl

RIP to a brilliant South Carolina artist

Photo from the S.C. State Museum

Pearl Fryar passed away Sunday at age 86. Pearl was a self-taught master of topiary—the sculpting of trees and shrubs into art. Thirty years ago, when I was writing features for the Charlotte Observer, I went to Pearl’s home in Bishopville, SC to interview him for a story. The great Observer photographer Bob Leverone went with me and took some amazing photos—the main shot was Pearl’s face surrounded by foliage, as if he had become part of the greenery. Which was pretty accurate.

I couldn’t find that photo online, but I did manage to unearth the story through the Observer archives in the Charlotte library. I thought I’d repost it today in memory of him. There are a lot of great pieces about Pearl out there—there’s even a fine documentary called A MAN NAMED PEARL, which I remember for the scene where a bunch of garden-club women came to tour the garden and couldn’t help but comment that Pearl was kind of hot.

I don’t know if they will keep giving tours of Pearl’s garden, but if they do, I hope you go see it. It’s a beautiful place and a testament to the power of vision, perseverance and love. I was honored to get to spend some time out there with the man and his life’s work.

*****

TWIG BY TWIG - WITH TIME AND A HEDGE TRIMMER, HE BENDS GREENERY INTO WORKS OF ART

The Charlotte Observer

October 27, 1996

Pearl Fryar doesn’t talk to his plants. But sometimes they speak to him.

He bends a sapling until its curve suddenly feels right in his hands. He clips and trims a hedge until its perfect shape emerges.

It may take years before a plant grows into the vision Fryar sees in his head. Sometimes the vision changes. It depends on where his heart leads him, and what the plants have to say.

Over the past 15 years, Fryar has turned his 3-acre plot just outside Bishopville into a living theme park. Hundreds of plants cover his land, every one sculpted and twisted into shapes that nature never imagined but Pearl Fryar did.

A holly bush grows in layers like an old petticoat. A dogwood’s branches are bound together, bare except for a shock of leaves at the top. The canopies of two oak trees meet like kissing swans.

”The books tell you you can’t do all these things,” Fryar says. “I never read the books.”

Gardeners all over the country know about Pearl Fryar‘s yard. A lot more people are about to find out.

On Tuesday, the S.C. State Museum will plant one of Fryar’s favorite works on its grounds in Columbia. It’s a 20-foot juniper that Fryar molded into abstract spirals; at its center are limbs curled to form a heart within a heart.

The museum has also cleared land for Fryar to plant trees and bushes and flowers. As the years go by he will turn the plants into art. From now until forever, everyone who visits the museum will see what Pearl Fryar can do.

Fryar likes that idea a lot.

Fryar will also learn more about himself. Every plant teaches him something. At age 56 he still hungers to learn.

”Well,’‘ he says, “it takes some longer than others to find out what it is that’s special about them.”

Pearl Fryar didn’t find out until he decided to try for Yard of the Month.

*

Fryar was born on a farm outside Clinton, N.C., about 35 miles east of Fayetteville. He had no love for plants. Plants meant work out in the field. Plants meant chores.

By the time he got to N.C. College at Durham (now N.C. Central University), he had decided to study math and chemistry. He had a plan. He would find a company to work for and he would rise through the company until he ran one of its plants somewhere. He would be the man in charge.

After a stint in the Army, he moved to New York City and got married in 1967. He had known his wife, Metra, since seventh grade. He went to New York because she was there.

Metra married him even though he didn’t have much money. Fryar grins as he talks about borrowing $500 from her before they wed: “She feels like, when she gets her $500 worth, she’s going to kick me out.”

They settled down. Metra worked as a seamstress. Pearl found a job with American National Can Co. They had a son, Patrick, now 26. Fryar spent long hours at the can company, working his way up, just as he had planned.

His job took them to Atlanta in 1975, then Bishopville a year later when American National Can built a new plant there. Fryar had advanced to down-the-line serviceman; he was in charge of keeping all the plant’s equipment in working order.

It was a good job and a good living. Still is. But Fryar came to realize he would never run the plant.

”I was too far away from the top, and I saw it wasn’t going to happen,” he says. “It was just reality.”

By then it was 1980. Just before Christmas, the Fryars moved from their apartment into a new house. The house was built on 3 acres of old cornfield.

For the first time since Fryar was a boy, he had a yard of his own.

*

Fryar started cleaning up the old farmland. He built a long arced driveway, pouring the concrete by hand. He took the first Christmas tree from the new house and planted it in the yard.

Bishopville’s Iris Garden Club had a Yard of the Month contest, and as Fryar started to like the way his yard looked, he thought he might give it a shot.

One day he drove to Camden to stop at Spitzer’s Nursery and look at some plants. At the nursery, he saw the strangest-looking bush he had ever seen. It looked like two pompons, one stacked on another.

Fryar knew it couldn’t have grown like that on its own. He could tell somebody had pruned it, but he couldn’t figure out how. He stared at that bush for the longest time. He finally asked if he could buy it.

It wasn’t for sale. But the nurseryman offered to give him a quick lesson in topiary - the art of sculpting plants into designs. Fryar had never even heard the word.

The nurseryman gave Fryar a load of old and wilted plants that the nursery was about to throw out. Fryar planted them in his yard and nursed them back to health. Then he started pruning them into designs of his own.

Fryar trimmed his stand of bushes, made his yard as nice as he knew how to make it. He turned in his application. He found out he couldn’t win.

He lived just outside town, and only people in town could win Yard of the Month.

He decided he would make the garden club make an exception.

Fryar bought truckloads of plants, $200 or $300 at a time, even though he told his wife he was spending just $50 or $60. He planted them in a line down the side of the yard, in a rectangle around the house, in a circle around the old Christmas tree.

He decided to make every plant look different. Somehow the ideas came easily. He looked at the branches of a Leyland cypress and saw fish bones. He looked at holly bushes and saw the letters L-O-V-E.

He pulled back limbs with string that he dyed black so it wouldn’t show. He lashed branches to PVC pipe that bent into all sorts of shapes. He clipped off hundreds of buds to leave the one or two that would grow into the design he wanted.

He stayed outside until 1 or 2 in the morning, setting up floodlights so he could work.

He asked the Yard of the Month folks to reconsider. They did. He kept the award for three months.

And one day he realized that what he was doing was more than a hobby.

”Gardening, it allows me to express myself and express my views where people can see them,” he says. “And everything out there is mine. They’re the originals. You can’t buy them.”

”Pearl is not content with the ordinary, with doing things quite as is expected,” says Polly Laffitte, curator of art for the state museum. “He’s pushing his medium beyond what is expected. To me, that’s art.”

*

The young plants grew, and Fryar kept adding more. After a few years the whole 3 acres had become his gallery.

People in town started driving down Broad Acres Road to take a look. Word spread through garden clubs. Out-of-towners began stopping by.

Sometimes Pearl and Metra gave tours. Other times they stayed inside and watched the strangers marvel at the plants. Every once in a while someone would weep with joy while walking through.

”You wouldn’t believe the looks on people’s faces when they come through here,” Metra Fryar says. “It’s a wonderful thing to see.”

People really started coming after a few gardening magazines and TV shows did stories on Pearl’s yard. These days, on a sunny Saturday or Sunday, 100 people might show up.

If they ask, Fryar shows how he makes the designs and takes care of the plants. He never waters or fertilizes. He surrounds the plants with pine straw, and he digs trenches around them to force the roots into deeper, moister soil.

Some folks in Bishopville think Fryar is a little, well, loopy. But half the neighbors on his street are trying out their own designs. Even the McDonald’s a mile up the road has a couple of fancy hedges.

Fryar loves it when people come to visit, but the more time he takes to show off his yard, the less time he has to keep it up.

”I think anything that you take . . . to this point, you get obsessed with it,” he says. “If I’m away for more than two days, I get nervous. I gotta be here. Something might go wrong, or I might get a new idea.

”When I did my first plant, and I saw that I could do it, it just gave me the greatest feeling. Everybody needs to get that feeling out of something. To some other person it might not mean nothing, but to you, no matter how small it is, it becomes your life.”

*

Pearl Fryar has a plan.

If this museum thing turns out like he hopes, he wants to make a video on how to garden the Pearl Fryar way. He could go on the lecture circuit - he has already spoken at garden shows from here to Kansas City.

He has turned down loads of money from people who want to buy his plants or have him work on their own. “A guy from Dallas, Texas, offered me $50,000 for 10 plants,” he says, shaking his head. “I just didn’t have the time. I still can’t believe I turned him down.”

If it all works out, he could retire early from American National Can. Then he could take some of those consulting jobs. He could hire somebody to help him with the garden.

First, though, the museum.

Fryar kneels in his driveway and sketches designs in the pebbles, like a kid drawing up a play in sandlot football. A row of hedges here. A splash of flowers there. Two or three big trees in the middle - he doesn’t know what they’ll look like yet, but he wants them to top anything he’s ever done.

”We’re gonna blow it out,” he says as his eyes get wide. “Nobody’s ever seen nothing like what we’re gonna do.”

And for years to come, when the people see, they will realize what he knew in his heart long ago, that Pearl Fryar is one heck of a plant manager.

Buy my books DOGLAND and THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM! They’re available in all formats pretty much everywhere books are sold.