There are more books on growing a garden than on growing a gardener. But how people grow into any area of human expertise is just as fascinating and essential to our futures as how we use our land. The quickest way to understand another person’s expertise is to learn how they acquired it. We are most fortunate in Fuquay-Varina to have a cornucopia of fascinating people with engaging areas of expertise.
I met one last week. After riding back in the truck with Mike Arthur for the “Homes for Healing” article (see the summer Suburban Living), Mike suggested doing a story on his daughter-in-law, who had recently published a book called The Foodscape Revolution.
It turns out that Brie Arthur’s book is a bestseller, well described by its subtitle of Finding a Better Way to Make Space for Food and Beauty in Your Garden. She also has a new book due out before Thanksgiving called Gardening with Grains: Bring the Versatile Beauty of Grains to Your Edible Landscape.
I had intended to learn from her what a gardener does in the winter, and I got numerous ideas about that. But the deeper story was how and why she became an expert in edible landscapes and what this might mean for Fuquay-Varina and our Suburban Living readers.
Who Do We Garden For?
One of the first questions to ask about the work of any expert is, “Who is it for?” Over time, our answers expand from family, to friends, to local groups, to anyone.
Brie began useful gardening activities with her parents before elementary school. By the early grades, she wouldn’t let her parents use the ride-‘em mower on their large yard, because they didn’t mow as straight as she did. At age 8, she became active in the 4-H and still talks fondly of the mentors she met there. By age 10, her 4-H efforts led to winning a sweepstakes at the Monroe County Fair, near Lake Erie where she grew up. “It was so empowering,” she said. “There’s nothing like a county fair! From farmers to suburban yuppies, 4-H was so welcoming.” It even had categories for public speaking and writing. Brie eventually went to college in horticulture. Still under 40, she now has an international audience.
Our nearest 4-H 0ffice is in Lillington. Here in Fuquay-Varina, we have elementary school gardens at least at Willow Springs and Lincoln Heights. It made me imagine that school garden competitions might be as useful for our collective futures as athletic competitions. Such competitions might even liven up our Growers Marker. As Brie put it, “Plants are such connectors!”
What’s Our Point of View?
A person’s point of view grows from single (usually one’s own), to comparative, to common, to universal. Young Brie was in charge of shearing the yew hedging that surrounded her parents’ entire yard. Her beginning point of view apparently was that hedging wasn’t as much fun as mowing, for she quickly added, “Why can’t we have plants that we should not have to do this?” In high school, her studies of environmental science helped her understand her parents’ point of view well enough to convince them to cut down the yews and put in viburnums, saucer magnolias, forsythias, and spruces. In our interview, she explained by adopting the viewpoints of even the birds and the bees. “Our shrubs are not really providing much service. They don’t feed or protect birds. They don’t provide flowers for pollinators and insects….We could replace them with diversity—plants that bloom at different times of years and grow to different heights.” She concluded with the universal truth that “Our yards are part of an ecosystem.”
We start with our own point of view and become a lot more sophisticated when we compare our views with others, whether parents, teachers, or even friends with different views from ours. Experience with comparisons enables us to imagine common experiences that we all have. Only after discovering our commonalities, can we drop our human perspective enough to understand the universal experiences captured by science. Perspective grows from single, to comparative, to common, to universal.
How Do We Organize Our Gardening?
We start new endeavors in a disconnected way. Next we organize by topics. Later we learn to plan whole projects, and ultimately, our efforts become persuasive.
For Brie, “In college, I studied landscape design in the Horticulture Department with a minor in entomology. I was the only hippie at Purdue. I didn’t fit in. A lot of kids in my classes came from Indiana farms. I wasn’t faced with the responsibility of feeding the nation. Ornaments are not the same as the pressures that the farmers have on them.” All this was still learning, mostly disconnected from acting as an expert gardener.
Next, came a series of jobs that each provided experience with different aspects of foodscapes. First, she came to Montrose Gardens in Chapel Hill as a college intern and later worked there for 3 years. “It has two open houses per year,” she explained. “It’s a bit like Downton Abbey. I was like one of the downstairs workers….I learned all the planting and management I know…. And to love plant propagation…Start with soil health. Cover the space with plant material that works together with community. Make it harvestable.”
From Montrose Garden, Brie went to Plant Delights as the Production Manager. “Owner Tony Avent is known all over the world,” she added. “He grows 23,000 varieties. Some even call him ‘the Darwin of now.’ There, I honed my organizational skills and plant knowledge. Next, to learn more about tree and shrub production, I went to Camellia Forest and worked with Kai Mei and Dr. Clifford Parks.”
All that topic-oriented experience enabled Brie to focus on an important goal that started at home. Around a decade ago, she and husband, David, bought a house in a neighborhood with a homeowners association. She wanted to eat healthy, organic food but couldn’t afford it. The association’s strict covenants seemed at odds with her goal. So, she used her horticultural knowledge to create an organic garden that would pass as landscape—a “foodscape.” She even enlisted help from two neighbor children, who are now engaged in an entrepreneurial garden effort that may help fund their future education.
New opportunities arose from the foodscape. “I’ve worked with so many amazing people,” she offered. “They opened many doors. I did a nationally syndicated PBS show with Joe Lamp’l called Growing a Greener World.” He told her, “The way you garden is important. You need to go out and teach people how to do it in small spaces—how they can have beautiful, meaningful landscapes.” With that encouragement, Brie’s new expanded goal meant going on her own. She could encourage people everywhere to become part of the “Foodscape Revolution” and see the opportunities that their own yards provide for a hobby, even a lifestyle, and a nourishing landscape.
Brie is persuasive. For her, there are a myriad of opportunities that suburban landscapes offer, now tied up in lawns that are mowed and shrubbery that is trimmed, and, I might add, at the expense of drudgery that even with good tools gets worse by the decade for the tool user.
In contrast, Brie’s message is, “If you want to make a difference in the world, garden. The more you do, the better. Beware of ‘low maintenance.’ It makes for bad gardening, which takes care and practice. Landscapes contractors, who want to keep doing the same old thing, waste our time and resources. It’s hard to imagine how you get into this business, if you don’t like plants.”
Brie Arthur does about 100 talks each year around the country and 10 locally. People in Texas love her, but she likes giving local talks, because she has learned how to grow here. She can save her local audiences from a lot of mistakes. For example, early on, her blueberry bushes failed, but now they are lush with fruit in season. Instead of a rose arbor, she has a tomato arbor, which looks almost as good, but is certainly tastier. For most people, it hurts to fail, so her talks and books help alleviate the hurt.
She even identifies psychological benefits for gardening. For people who can’t handle people, plants can become their lives. Plants do not evaluate habits and thoughts. She sees a lot of solutions that can be learned through plants. “They make us kinder neighbors and better stewards of the planet… When people complain that kids these days are addicted to screens, it’s because people aren’t giving them anything more meaningful to do.” She has known neighbors, who plan sleepovers around gardening.
At first, as a motivational speaker, Brie found it hard to tell what she was accomplishing. She was earning a living but couldn’t see what was growing. Then, a few years ago she began getting inundated with notes from people growing garlic. When you think that 90% of garlic is imported from China, but you can grow it in your yard, there is a huge reduction in the “food-miles” statistic just for the garlic. “There’s a secret behind garlic,” she adds, “it’s easy to grow. You can buy it from the store and plant it. It’s a cool-season crop. Plant it now and it doesn’t need to be fertilized or watered. And its crown jewel is that animals, like deer and ground hogs, don’t eat it. You can plant it along your garden bed’s edge and get 800 bulbs in your yard. You can use it in your cooking.”
Any of us can start our own local foodscape revolutions by growing 2 or 3 things, being successful, and sharing our results with anyone who will listen. Nobody is offended. If we can do it with garlic, they can do it with potatoes.
So there we have how to organize the development of your foodscape expertise. Start disorganized—explore many possibilities—but get started. Next, learn the basics, like what to plant when. Brie describes the zones of a yard, the ornamental framework, adding edibles, and providing care and maintenance. With these established, we can start planning special spaces like a foodie fire pit or property screen edible meadows. Start disorganized, learn key topics, plan, and ultimately learn to persuade others.
Fuquay-Varina Inspiration
Brie helped me envision Fuquay-Varina becoming famous for foodscapes. Developers would need to change their slash-and-sod approaches to match the progress of our elementary schools. Homeowners would need to adapt association covenants to create new opportunities. Neighbors would need to share. Growers markets would need to provide opportunities for youth to show and tell what they accomplished. We would all need to have fun with our foodscapes. I imagine many readers might like that vision.
