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Grumpy old gardeners

LSU horticulture professors Ed O'Rourke Jr. and Leon Standifer have written a book about Southern gardening that is destined to be as colorful and classic as they are.

02/23/02

By Judy Walker
Staff writer/The Times-Picayune

BATON ROUGE -- After spending 13 years writing a book about gardening in the deep South, self-admitted "crotchety old horticulture professsors" Ed O'Rourke Jr. and Leon Standifer had an easy answer for the editors who kept trying to make their work more marketable.

"We're too old to spend money if we make money," Standifer argued.

"We knew they were wrong," O'Rourke added.

When changes were ordered, they screamed. They yelled. Much of the time, in the end, they deferred.

But when they wanted to be persuasive, they had their ways.

"Every time we really needed something," Standifer said, "we took vegetables to them."

The strategy worked. The result is "Gardening in the Humid South," published this month by LSU Press. Fun to read, crammed with knowledge and brimming with its authors' colorful personalities, it is bound to become a classic in our region.

O'Rourke and Standifer are old coffee-drinking buddies who disagree on all sorts of topics. Both are professors emeritus of horticulture: Standifer retired from Louisiana State University in 1990, O'Rourke in 91.

"We like arguing and we like teaching," Standifer said.

On walks for the last dozen years, they aired their opinions on how to go about gardening, frequently expressing opposite views and taking good-natured digs at each other. They drank gallons of coffee and discussed their quibbles with other faculty members.

And when they wrote the book together, unlike most co-authors, O'Rourke and Standifer didn't put their differences aside. They celebrated them.

Standifer likened the book to "the class they would never allow us to teach. No tests. You like a subject, if you want to come to the lecture for that subject, OK. Otherwise, skip over it."

There's another reason LSU wouldn't have allowed them to teach this class: It took 13 years to complete. O'Rourke and Standifer signed a contract for the book in 1988 and said they would deliver it in a year. After being told their manuscript needed revision, they spent the next 12 years writing 16 different versions before finally getting the book into its current form.

The first chapter sets the hook with a discussion of the art of gardening. Then they go into the "whys," the science of how it all works.

They allow that they don't know everything there is to know about gardening, and that the reader will notice much of their information is old, since they quit following scientific literature when they retired. "Not to worry; the art of gardening is even older than we are," they write.

The book is dedicated to Claudette Price, who came up with the idea for the book.

"She said, "There is not a good fundamental gardening book about the South. And it's different down here,' " Standifer said. "Most books say Gardening is gardening whether you do it in New York or Texas,' but that's just not the way it is. We're subtropical."

When Price asked him if he would write the gardening book, he said, "No way, unless Ed will, because I don't have the breadth in horticulture like Ed does."

The two still practice what they preach at the Burden Center, which includes the Rural Life Museum, a conference center and experimental gardens where horticulture faculty, students and master gardeners maintain plots. Here they grow beautiful lettuces and other vegetables and a plant called rattlesnake master, an eryngium related to the ornamental sea holly. Native Americans made fabric out of this plant, and O'Rourke and Standifer grow it for Standifer's wife, Marie, an archaeobotanist.

To keep the book to a manageable length, they omitted material on plant grafting, an entire chapter on vegetables, a shorter chapter on herbs, and information on the three stages that happen when you bake a sweet potato, which Standifer, the vegetable-lover, particularly hated to lose.

Their out-of-state garden editor, the authors said, didn't understand their country lingo and deleted their Irish jokes. He did, however, leave in the Cajun jokes.

"He did let me call myself a redneck," Standifer added.

Standifer is from Clinton, Mississippi, now a suburb of Jackson, where he mowed lawns for boyhood money. He has lived across the street from colleges since he was seven years old.

O'Rourke is a New Orleans native who graduated from Alcee Fortier High School when it was an all-boy school of 2,200 students and rode the streetcars to boyhood jobs for old-time nurserymen. He still remembers conducting his first horticultural experiment when he was four or five years old after his father bought a rose for his sister.

"It was Cecile Brunner, still on the market, a pretty little rose," he said. "I discovered it had aphids all over it and I knew what to do. I went inside and got the Flit gun and sprayed it. Well, as they say, the operation was a success, but the patient died. So I learned about insect control and selected herbicides very early."

O'Rourke rooted boxwood for hedges and sold them for 25 cents each. He learned the grocery business working for H.P. Hills Grocery, operating one-man grocery stores on Lowerline Street and Elysian Fields Avenue. He learned the value of hard work and had offers from grateful employers to set him up in either business, but by then he'd also learned he didn't want to be either a grocer or nurseryman.

"Other people's holidays are hell on earth in the greenhouse business," O'Rourke said. "Somebody's got to be there to water, ventilate and so on."

O'Rourke attended what was then Southwest Louisiana Institute in Lafayette, but then came World War II. Both men got their first full-time jobs in the early 1940s when the army employed them "to operate M-1 rifles in Europe," they write.

O'Rourke said he was lucky enough to get into George Patton's First Army Group, the Phantom Army fooling Hitler into thinking we were going to invade Germany. After D-Day, he was assigned to Gen. Bradley's 38th Headquarters Company Special Troops, and ended the war with five campaign battle stars.

Standifer served as an infantry scout for three months in Brittany, and was wounded and in the hospital when the Battle of the Bulge broke out. Later, he was in the Army of Occupation in Germany, and got out with three campaign battle stars. He later wrote two books, published by LSU Press, about his war experiences.

On the GI Bill at Mississippi State College, Standifer was a soils chemistry major. After working in a fertilizer factory for two and a half years, he had enough and went to graduate school at the University of Wisconsin, winding up with a doctoral degree in "what would now be called genetic engineering. Back then, it was just called plant tissue culture."

O'Rourke majored in horticulture at what is now the University of Louisiana in Lafayette and got a doctorate at Cornell in pomology -- apple culture. He spent his first five years at LSU working on a research project to develop varieties of pear, plum, applee and fig trees for this region. He then took over the floriculture program. The two men met at LSU around 1962 and took to each other.

O'Rourke at one time was one of three fig experts in the world, Standifer pointed out. Indeed, O'Rourke has a fig legacy.

"I always wanted to get a good purple fig and call it LSU Purple," O'Rourke said. His graduate students spread some of his original young trees around the state and, finally, LSU Purple fig trees should be in nurseries soon. And, thanks to some of O'Rourke's graduate students of Italian descent who took another fig to their home places in Tangipahoa Parish, you may see some LSU Gold figs on the market one of these days, too.

"It's a big round flat fig with a short stem and delicious taste," O'Rourke said.

Figs and rattlesnake master aside, the two admit they are looking for something else to do these days, now that the book is out. For a while on their walks they picked up pennies and change and bought lottery tickets, two a week. Then they saved the change to buy seed and fertilizer, and king cakes and doughnuts to take to the people who work at Burden.

Then they started walking behind the LSU sororities and fraternities. There, Standifer checks the dumpsters.

"It's like a daily garage sale," Standifer said. "Once in a while you find something interesting."

Standifer discovers all kinds of things and was wearing a plaid shirt he found. Standifer repairs, cleans, gives away. The end of the semester is a particular bonanza.

O'Rourke said he stands off to the side and pretends not to know Leon as he dumpster-dives.

"My wife said, Aren't you embarrassed?' I said, Not after 10 years with Leon.' "

However, he was wearing a pair of sneakers rescued from the trash and washed, as was Standifer. They wondered aloud if the photographer taking their picture that day could use a pair, too.

. . . . . . .

Homes and gardens writer Judy Walker can be reached at jwalker@timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3485.

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