| Tony Lord: The Avant Gardener |
| Eclectic gardener Tony Lord has a way with the weird. |
From "Dirt On Gardening"
episode DDOG-107 |
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The eclectic gardener, Tony Lord
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When it comes to growing plants, Tony Lord leans toward the unusual, obscure and extreme. In fact, a local newspaper once profiled this soft-spoken and mild-mannered gardening renegade, referring to him as "the loose seed in the packet."Tony's interest in the exotic may stem from his earlier career since, as a social anthropologist, he spent time in Micronesia studying the connections between nature and indigenous peoples.
Today, a trip to Tony's backyard garden is a horticultural walk on the wild side. Aside from some very uncommon looking orchids and other unusual flowering plants, it features a stand of sugar cane, a coffee bush and vegetable oddities like the bitter melon.
That innocent-looking ornamental with white blooms is in fact datura, also known jimson weed or nightshade, a hallucinogenic plant that has been associated with sacred rituals and witchcraft in Mexico. In another corner of the garden, the plant with green and purple cone-shaped leaves is the carnivorous Saracinia. It's actually a pretty low-care garden selection. It merely requires distilled water and a few "snacks" of the insect variety every now and again.
Datura, also known as nightshade...
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has been associated with ritual magic.
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But living up to the moniker of "the eclectic gardener" requires diligence. Tony keeps meticulous notes on all of his many specimens using a filing card system. Moreover, he plants several hundred seed varieties each year. "I'll go through the seed catalogs," says Tony, "and if [the ad] says 'Amaze your neighbors!'...I'll buy it."
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