Early every morning Steve Wilson and his 10-month-old son, Christian, carefully survey
"the castle grounds."
Their estate is a small one in north Denver, just south of Regis University. The front
and back yards of the Wilsons' bungalow are almost consumed by an amazing, unruly series
of gardens, overrun with scented geraniums, thyme, lamb's ear, peonies, lillies, tomatoes,
old roses, golden spirea, pussy toes, crocuses and cactuses. There are also, of course,
the irises from his grandfather's Pennsylvania flower beds.
Wilson, 35, an Episcopal priest at St. John's Cathedral in Denver, grew up watching his
father, also a rector, work the soil. He's one of a select group of men in the United
States who are likely to be found in their gardens on Father's Day, men who find solace in
dirt, who meditate as they weed, who envision a brilliant-colored canvas with each new
flower they put into the ground.
"Christian and I go out into the garden first thing each morning," Wilson
says. "We call it our walk around the castle. I also come out here when I get home
from work. It is my 'de-stress' period between church life and home life."
Wilson and many of his male friends are gardeners. They share plant cuttings and seeds,
they monitor one another's successes and failures. They show their children how to plant
and how to nourish and grow things.
An estimated 28 million American men garden, says Bruce Butterfield, director of
research at the Burlington, Vt.-based National Gardening Association. But their ranks are
shrinking, he says, with men representing about 41 percent of gardeners and women 59
percent.
Experts believe fewer men garden because of time constraints and because gardens these
days often serve a different purpose from what they once did, providing ornamentation
rather than food, says Warren Schultz, author of A Man's Garden.
Thirty years ago, participation among men and women "was probably closer to
50-50," Schultz says. "A lot of men then and now garden for production, for the
end result, to provide food. That's the heritage of the American-male garden."
Greig Chesne, a stay-at-home dad and avid gardener, has embraced that heritage,
producing vegetables and herbs for his family.
Meticulous raised beds line one side of Chesne's back yard in Longmont. The beds are
filled with chard, spinach, arugula, mustard greens, garlic, leeks, tomatoes, green beans
and a slew of herbs.
There are lilacs and flower beds as well, though they're largely the domain of his
wife, Bridgette. "Eating out of the garden can't be matched," Chesne says as his
3-year-old son Landin races around the yard.
Like Wilson, Chesne, 35, makes an early-morning tour of his garden with Landin in tow,
surveying new growth and scouting for weeds and insect damage.
Chesne has no gardening heritage to guide his modern cultivating. He stumbled into soil
work 12 years ago when he and wife tried to grow flowers on their apartment balcony.
"It electrified me," he says.
The next summer, he began claiming space in whichever community garden had an open
plot.
Now he relies on his spacious backyard garden to provide not just salad greens but a
learning lab for his young son and a sense of rhythm to the days he spends at home.
"The vegetables are definitely a 'value-added' for my family," Chesne says.
"But gardening is also meditative and peaceful. It's an opportunity to just slow
down."
Millions of American men who once viewed gardens much as Chesne does find themselves
stymied by a more stylized, ornamental notion of the garden, Schultz says. And that's why
Schultz decided to write his book, to raise the profile of male gardeners and to make sure
they're given their due in the annals of gardening history.
"I thought that male gardeners were getting short shrift," Schultz says.
"These days, people turn their noses up at the notion of production gardening. But we
once gardened to provide for our families. And even during the 1960s and 1970s it was
cool, it was part of the counterculture. But that has begun to fade. Now there's more
gardening for ornamentation."
And that's just fine with Stan Barrett, a retired aeronautics engineer
and former president of the Denver Rose Society. Barrett embraces the idea of gardening as
an act of artistry and a study in science.
Barrett, a native of Yorkshire, England, used to draw elaborate gardening plans as a
10-year-old, watching his own father cultivate flowers, and the 68-year-old father of four
is still enthralled with flowers, with their color, the shape of the bloom, the texture of
their foliage.
Though he spent decades as an aerospace engineer, he says, "I could have
cheerfully been a horticulturist."
As you walk up the drive of his Littleton home, a cloud of fragrance floats down the
hill. More than 70 varieties of flowers, and an additional 40 varieties of roses, cover
his front yard. The back yard is equally intense, hosting lilac bushes, honeysuckle, pink
Canadian roses, climbing roses, crab-apple trees, lilies and a few token vegetable beds.
Every morning, Barrett is out in the gardens. One bed is set aside for his five
grandchildren. All the beds are lush and ambitious, existing in a continual state of
change.
Five years ago he took a series of painting classes, and his flower beds reflect his
fascination with color. Some flowers are planted for their purple hues, others for their
pinks and whites.
Barrett finds an outlet among the plants for art and nurturance that he never found as
an engineer.
"The manual part of digging a hole, putting something in it and watching it grow
-- that's exciting. And I enjoy messing with colors. Gardening for me is a combination of
artistry and creativity," Barrett says.
Gardening pros such as Schultz would lure more men to the soil if they could.
"Gardening can be very relaxing," he says. "It's a way to escape the work
world and to reconnect with nature and the seasons, to care whether or not it rains."
For Wilson it's even more than that. "In the ministry, you're always planting
seeds, but you don't necessarily see the outcome," he says. "Gardening is very
tangible. It's a way of staying connected physically to something much bigger than myself,
of finding a bit of heaven on Earth."
