A cut above

Southern Living, Spring 2001 by Bender, Steve

We know you've never met anyone like this artist. In his gifted hands, ordinary plants become extraordinary.

Pearl Fryar is the best thing that ever happened to a juniper. Left to its own devices, this lowly shrub might be doomed to a life of decorating the front of a drive-in bank. But in Pearl's hands, it becomes a Picasso-an abstract expression of the plant's full potential.

If you haven't heard of Pearl Fryar yet, you will. The work of this self-taught master of topiary (the art of pruning trees and shrubs into different forms) has been acclaimed throughout North America and Europe. His topiaries are displayed at the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and at Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston. He has appeared on the Discovery Channel, HGTV, and PBS's The victory Garden. And he is in constant demand on the garden lecture circuit.

But Pearl bestows his most precious

gift on his community of Bishopville, South Carolina. Holding up his own life as an example to at-risk schoolchildren from low-income families, this sharecropper's son inspires them to believe in themselves so that they, too, may reach their full potentials.

In a funny way, the Pearl Fryar phenomenon largely owes its existence to the Bishopville Yard-of-the-Month award. Pearl and Metra, his wife of 34 years, had lived in North Carolina, New York, and Atlanta but never had a yard. So when they moved to Bishopville in 1976, Pearl decided the Yard-of-the-- Month was going to be his. There was one little problem-at the time, the award was limited to city residents, and Pearl's yard lay just outside city limits.

"I needed a reason for the city to make an exception," Pearl recalls. "So I started cutting up plants and got a lot of attention. One thing led to another until I decided, 'I'm going to cut up every plant in my yard-pine trees, oak trees, blue spruce. You name it.' " His strategy worked. The powers-that-be made an exception, and Pearl got his award.

It was an award a younger Pearl Fryar never would have conceived might be his. As a youth, he saw athletics as the only way to escape poverty. "I was going to be the next Roy Campanella," he says ruefully. "If only I'd spent as many hours with my books as I spent behind a plate catching baseballs."

Two women set him on the right track. The first was Mallie Butler Stock. "She was my role model," he says, "the first black lady in my community to go to college. I ended up going to the same college that she did-North Carolina Central in Durham." There, in the first art appreciation class he had ever attended, Pearl discovered Pablo Picasso.

"When I saw the work of Picasso, it changed my life," he reveals. "I saw some of his work before he became famous and saw that he stayed with it to the point where he believed in himself, then got the attention of the people who could make the difference."

The second woman to influence Pearl was Polly Laffitte, former art curator for the South Carolina State Museum. In 1997, she was looking for self-taught artists to feature at an exhibition, and she visited Pearl. "It blew me away," Polly says of his garden. "He pushed beyond anybody's expectations of what you could do with topiary. What he was doing was sculpture." When she subsequently commissioned him to create topiaries for the museum, Pearl felt affirmed as an artist.

Today, his 3-acre topiary garden showcases hundreds of evergreen and deciduous plants pruned into fanciful forms. He prefers creating abstract shapes, feeling they afford him more creativity. He prunes according to his mind's design, refusing to trim plants to fit frames: "That kind of topiary looks fantastic, but it takes no skill at all."

He is just as good a gardener as he is an artist. In addition to the pruned junipers and yews you'd expect to find in his yard, he trains blue spruce, Norway spruce, Canadian hemlock, and Fraser fir-cool-weather conifers you'd never imagine would survive in the Lower South. He succeeds by digging a 6-inch-- deep trench around each tree a few feet out from the trunk, then mounding pine straw around the base. The trench forces tree roots to go deeper into the soil. The pine straw aids drainage and aeration and also keeps roots cool and moist.

When he isn't trimming his greenery, Pearl spends much of his time reshaping the attitudes of minority schoolchildren. He lectures at schools and teaches topiary in his garden. His message"You can accomplish anything in life if you believe in yourself.

"These are kids that feel that society has left them out," he says. "If you want to motivate them, you cannot send them a doctor or a lawyer. They'll look at him and say, 'Well, you had money.' But I'll walk in and say, 'Look, I grew up on a farm and walked several miles to school. But I taught myself to be an artist, something I could make a living at. So don't let anyone dictate where you go in life."'

Pearl continues, "My favorite bit of advice is this: 'He or she who does no more than average never rises above the average.' That's like my garden. Most plants I have are the same as you'd find in any garden in Bishopville. The difference is, I believed in my art and went one step further."