 
The big producer will say, “Who the hell is Tony Avent?” And I’ll say—because this is how they say things out in Hollywood—“Think Indiana Jones meets Gregor Mendel.” And he’ll say, “Who the hell is Gregor Mendel?” “The Austrian priest and part-time botanist who basically discovered the basis of genetics by breeding garden peas?” “Oh,” he’ll say. “That Gregor Mendel. Love it. Tell me more.” Maybe it won’t go exactly this way. But there is a movie here, in the story of Tony Avent’s life, one full of adventure, science, romance, and a poetic vision of how a life could be lived, a vision he had when he was only seven years old. To understand who he has always wanted to be, all you have to do is look at where Tony Avent is now. With his wife, Michelle, he owns and operates one of the largest nurseries in America, Plant Delights, on twenty-two acres of land south of Raleigh, North Carolina, in a place called Juniper Level. “Juniper’s not on the maps anymore,” he says. “But that’s where we are.” So yes, he is in the middle of nowhere. But you’ll know it when you see it, after getting off I-40, passing thirteen churches, four new housing developments, two vine-covered barns, and one authentic country store: It’s where a red-dirt ravine by the side of the road explodes into a wonderland of glorious vegetation, of weird cacti and flowering trees, flowers, and bushes—things you think you’ve never seen before. Because you probably haven’t. A lot of the plants you find out here at Juniper Level you’re not going to find anywhere else. And by anywhere else I mean anywhere else in the world. Turn into the narrow drive and it takes only an instant to realize that it doesn’t matter whether this town has a name or not, because you have left it. Stretching ahead of you into the hilly distance in every direction is one greenhouse after another. Covered in white plastic, they look like a bunch of never-ending oblong igloos. Continue driving down the one-lane graveled road and the greenhouses give way to fields. The fields appear to be fallow at first, but the closer you get you can see row after row of something growing—who knows what it is—all kinds of tiny plants and each one with its own little sign, a name, a date. Science! This is what you see as you drive in and park. What you don’t see at first is the garden. The Juniper Level Botanic Gardens are to the right. Six acres contain more plants than you ever even thought existed, all grown in organic, composted soil, and none of them manicured. Tony Avent believes in letting plants be plants, and his nursery displays them in a way that makes you think you’ve never really seen a plant before. Never known its true beauty. Never realized the miraculous fecundity that surrounds us. You want to stop walking, find Tony Avent, and thank him. Tony Avent is a down-to-earth guy who is pleasantly brilliant, the way only a Southerner can be. I’d say he’s a cross between…Harrison Ford and Tom Hanks. Tough exterior, skin browned by the sun and dirt he practically lives in. A solid man. But thoughtful. Passionate. Dresses with the red-flannel disregard of a man who clearly has other things on his mind. Big personality. And smart. This is a guy with a lot of numbers swimming around in his head. He still amazes his wife of thirty years, Michelle. “Every day he tells me how many plants sold today compared with a year ago today, compared with the year before that. Every single day. He knows it. It’s in his head.” Introducing Michelle Avent, and with her, naturally, the romantic element of this story. They met working at a movie theater when they were just teenagers and have been together ever since. “I’d never met anybody so intense in my life,” she says. “Not just about one thing, either. About everything.” They supported themselves by offering to clean out people’s attics and basements for free, and then selling anything they found of value at a yard sale—along with a few of Tony’s plants. They didn’t have any children, but they did have a nursery: Tony’s first was four feet by eight feet long. They moved to a house with a bigger yard and then he had a half acre, including parts of the neighbors’ yards they were allowed to use. They were both working for the state then, and not making a lot of money. But Tony kept telling Michelle about this vision he’d had since he was seven years old. A vision of a kind of horticultural paradise, where there were flowers and plants no one could find anywhere else in the world. “I thought everybody was like that,” he says. “I thought everybody knew what they wanted from the very beginning.” With the little money they had he bought two acres of land out in a place called Juniper Level, two acres of land that has since turned into twenty-two, and it’s still growing. Michelle didn’t really get it. She never really cared much for plants, and never thought anybody would order them through the mail. But she stuck with him. Today they have over 1,500 items for sale at any one time and sell over 100,000 plants a year. As the catalogue states under job descriptions: Tony Avent, President. Michelle Avent, Everything Else. That’s love. That’s romance. And in a way it’s not surprising: Where there are flowers, there’s going to be romance. What you don’t necessarily expect is the adventure. But there’s a ton of that too. Argentina, China, South Africa, Vietnam: There’s nowhere Avent won’t go and almost nowhere he hasn’t gone—to discover not only new species of plants, but new samples of existing species. This means going to the places these plants grow naturally, finding where they grow in the wild, and plucking a couple to bring back home. This is how Avent bridges the chasm between botany and horticulture, and the whole raison d’être of his garden. Tony Avent is the Indiana Jones of the herbaceous perennials. He’s an adventurer, an explorer, the kind you don’t see much of anymore, because we believe there’s not much left out there to be discovered. And while we may have found all the really big, obvious things—like mountains and oceans—it’s the smart explorer who goes small and finds something heretofore unknown. He shows me a tree growing in his backyard. “Brought it back from China,” he says. “No one had ever seen anything like it. Just look at those flowers.” It is beautiful. I’ve never seen so many flowers on a tree before. He named it Michelia yunnanensis ‘Michelle.’ After his wife. Because of new laws that prohibit plants from being transported out of their native cultures, ambitious horticulturists have been turned into potential criminals. Not that Tony Avent has ever done anything illegal. But his trip to Korea was kept on the down low: That’s right, he went undercover. And he was held up at customs in Vietnam when a strange root somehow found its way into his luggage. Hidden somewhere beneath his socks and underwear. And, as he writes in one of his many colorful expedition reports about a trip to Texas, “While baptisia rustling isn’t on the same level as bungee jumping from an airplane, I can attest that being stopped by an unhappy Texas rancher with a fast four-wheel drive and a really big gun is not for the faint of heart.” Trips like these are only one of many reasons Tony Avent is a hero to anyone who values plant exploration, propagation, and education. Without him we would not have the breadth of knowledge we now do about thousands of plant varieties, some of which—who knows?—may one day contribute not only to the beauty of someone’s garden, but to a hitherto unknown medicine. Because when plants go extinct their particular properties, which can truly benefit mankind, are lost forever. But I’m having second thoughts now about this movie. As I tell it here I can see what a great action flick it could make—it has everything—but so much of what makes Tony Avent Tony Avent would be lost in the process. The complexity of the man, his contradictions. I don’t know if Hollywood is up to portraying him accurately. For instance. As we’re meandering down the sun-dappled path of his garden, he’s going on and on about “biodiversity” and “plant stress” and “organic gardens,” and he sounds like an old hippie who has picked up a fancy phrase or two along the way. Right plant, right place, he’s fond of saying. It’s kind of like his mantra. But don’t get him started about climate change or global warming or the people who spend so much of their time and money trying to do something about it. “People are no more than specks on Mother Nature’s butt,” he says. “They’re crazy if they really think there’s anything we can do to change nature. One volcano does more to change the environment than anything man has or could do. We’ve all seen the film of the ice shelves falling into the ocean, but no one mentions how they’re freezing on the other side!” He can get animated about this. “People who believe in this sort of thing,” he says, “are looking to put meaning into their lives. I don’t need more meaning in my life. I’ve got a lot of it already.” To hear him tell it, this is not a political stance, but a scientific one. We’re definitely in a warming trend, but it used to be a lot warmer here, he says, and he’s got the petrified wood to prove it: As his gardens have expanded, he’s been digging up tons of petrified wood, some of it from ancient palm trees that used to cover the area. Also not meant to be political, according to Tony Avent, are the covers of his catalogues. He prints nearly 100,000 catalogues every season, at a cost to him of about $1.25 per catalogue (free to you). Each edition is graced with a different cover, commenting in some way on current events. The latest one has Hillary Clinton on it as a doctor, with Britney Spears, Dick Cheney, and Alberto Gonzales in the waiting room, under the title Nationalized Plant Care. Clinton has graduation certificates from Pork Barrel U. and Taxe$ Tech on the wall. Another catalogue title that drew considerable response was Gardening Jihad. Another was Gitmo Plant Evaluation Center. He’s even had one of his biggest fans, Martha Stewart, on the cover…prancing across the hills with a big bag of money, a Kmart being erected in the background. As one might expect, he gets his share of hate mail, which he kindly posts on his Web site for everyone to read. The thing is, I’m not sure if my fictional producer wants to hear about this part. You know how those Hollywood types are. So I’ll skip it. Instead, I’ll talk about immortality. I brought this up with Tony Avent. Hidden away in the greenhouses where the public can’t go, a lot of mad-scientist genetic modification stuff is going on. Breeding, he calls it, but it’s a lot like what Mendel was doing with peas when he discovered that certain traits are inherited when two different strains of something are crossed. Tony Avent does it with hostas. He has created a bunch of hostas that have never been seen before on earth. He has created them, named them—even patented one (Hosta ‘Tattoo’). It’s kind of biblical when you think about it. Once they’ve made it into the catalogue and are ordered by gardeners from all around the world, they will proliferate. And long after he’s gone these things he has created will be living in the world, making people happy, helping keep the planet together with their very roots. It is a kind of immortality, isn’t it? I ask him. He stops in his tracks. “You know, I guess it is. I guess.” But just as quickly as the idea gets to him he seems to silently reject it. Starts walking. “I’ve never thought about it.” I believe him. “Then why do you do it?” “Why does anybody do what they do?” His pace picks up, but he keeps his head down. He’s looking at his babies. “I love it. I love plants.” End of story, a happy one. |
||||||||
