A Cut Above – When Pearl Fryar moved to Bishopville in 1976, the three acres that surround his suburban ranch-style home consisted of nothing but flat, barren cornfields. In the early eighties, he began planting and pruning trees and shrubs. After two-and-a-half decades of near constant labor, he has transformed his yard into an internationally-known topiary garden that attracts 5,000 visitors a year. This month, SCIway traveled to Bishopville to meet Mr. Fryar, who talked to us for the better part of two hours and treated us to ice cold bottles of water and our very first ride on a cherry picker!

Madness lends itself to legend, and by now most of us have heard the story behind Pearl Fryar’s wild, whimsical garden just outside Bishopville in Lee County. Mr. Fryar, they say, simply wanted to win “Yard of the Month.”

Fryar regularly spreads this rumor himself, but dig a little deeper, and you may find yourself asking, “Why?” Turns out that when Fryar, his wife Metra, and their son Patrick first came to Bishopville back in the early eighties, they tried to buy a house in an all-white neighborhood but soon found they weren’t welcome. Black folks, they were told, “don’t keep up their yards.”

	FISHBONE TOPIARY		LOVE & UNITY SCULPTURE		PEARL FRYAR’S POTHEAD

 
A quarter-century later, it’s pretty clear that’s not the case. Since that time, Fryar has won “Yard of the Month” three times – a feat considering the piece of property he eventually bought lies outside of the town’s limits and isn’t technically even eligible. He’s also been awarded a Medal of Honor in Art from Winthrop University and serves as artist-in-residence at Coker College, where he teaches classes.

If that weren’t enough, he’s also a hot commodity on the lecture circuit, traveling near and far to speak and demonstrate his unorthodox techniques. His topiaries have sold as installations of “living sculpture” to museums for as much as 35 grand apiece. He’s a fixture on television shows including HGTV and PBS’s Victory Gardens. Perhaps most impressive of all, his garden was recently selected by the Garden Conservancy as one of the four most important gardens in the Southeast. As such, they hope to help preserve it long after Fryar himself is gone. (South Carolina’s Brookgreen Gardens is another of the four gardens selected.)

But don’t stop there. Dig deeper still and you’ll learn that Fryar was born a sharecropper’s son in rural Clinton, North Carolina. Growing up he learned from his parents that the way to survive in this world was to become “invisible.” Fryar, who was active in sit-ins and protests during the Civil Rights movement, often wrote home to his mother and said, “Mama. I got nothing to do with this.” His hero was and remains Jackie Robinson. Though Fryar never played much baseball, he watched as Robinson broke into a previously all-white world. Robinson, he says, laid the groundwork for the Civil Rights movement and made things possible for Fryar’s other hero, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

After serving in Korea, Fryar followed his grade school sweetheart to New York. They married, and he soon found work as a troubleshooter at a canning plant. Eventually they were transferred to Atlanta, and when an opportunity to move to Bishopville arose, Fryar took it to be closer to his family.
Despite years of service to his company, Fryar was never promoted to plant manager. When the New York Times interviewed Fryar in 2005, they asked him if this was “because he was black.” Fryar chose his words carefully, explaining that the situation in the South “had not changed that much.” His wife Metra answered more directly: “Yes.”

Whatever the reason, Fryar’s frustration was real. Mrs. Fryar explains that one day Fryar went out into the front yard and cut up their holly. Thinking back, she says, “I thought he had lost it.”
Maybe he had. From then on, Fryar found himself working ten-hour shifts at the plant, then coming home to set up ladders and spotlights so he could work all night and into the morning on his “Dr. Seuss meets Salvador Dali” designs. The local electric company eventually set up a street light in his backyard to help him out. Today the lamp is festooned in a thirty-foot teepee of creeping juniper – easily one of the loveliest luminaries in all of SC.

Down but not out, Fryar had discovered a new way to excel and receive recognition. He retired three years ago and now prunes full-time. Fryar says his garden is “finished” now, meaning he no longer adds new plants. The maintenance is constant, of course, and he is quick to point out that topiaries aren’t a good hobby for someone who wants to hunt, fish, or really, do just about anything else.

At 68, Fryar finally has a little help around the yard. With support from the Garden Conservancy and the newly-formed Friends of Pearl Fryar’s Topiary Garden, he’s been able to hire a man part-time. That doesn’t mean he’s taking it easy – far from it in fact. Fryar seems to be busier than ever these days, but he’s never too busy to greet his guests. In all he welcomes about 5,000 visitors to his yard each year – at no charge – and it seems important to him to make sure people understand what he calls his “message.”

Mr. Fryar should rest assured: That message is hard to miss. From the “junk art” metal ornaments he welds with his neighbor and emboldens with words like love, unity, and faith to the giant four-foot letters he’s cut into his sod to spell “Peace, Love, and Goodwill,” it is plain to see there’s a higher purpose operating here.

In short, Fryar seeks to inspire. He is a man who has risen above disappointment and ordinary constraints – constraints of society, constraints of nature, and constraints of art. His garden grows tall and proud with plants that have no business surviving summers in the South. He uses no fertilizers or pesticides and waters very little. He has no formal training in what is traditionally considered a formal art. His only lesson was a three-minute demonstration from a nurseryman in Camden two-and-a-half decades ago. Then again, as Fryar is fond of saying, “Not knowing ahead of time that something is supposed to be impossible often makes it possible to achieve.”

And the result? Well, these days Pearl Fryar is hardly invisible. Still, somehow we think his parents would not only be pleased but also incredibly proud.

Want to learn more about the man and his art? Check out SCIway’s Guide to the Pearl Fryar Topiary Gardens to find pictures, stories, videos, and more. Also stay tuned for A Man Named Pearl, the feature-length documentary being released nationwide this summer. Most importantly, go visit the gardens yourself. You won’t be sorry – they’re worth the trip!