High-stress jobs come in all kinds of packages. Whether you earn your paycheck in front of TV cameras, do daily battle with bureaucrats or just have to keep smiling while dealing with the public, it`s only natural to crave a big slice of soul-satisfying tranquility once you`ve left the wilds of the working world for home, sweet home.
These days, more and more hard-charging career types are discovering that gardening offers a delightfully relaxing change of pace from the workaday world-and can teach you a few valuable lessons in life along the way. Read on to find out why some of the city`s busiest people, several of them very familiar faces, spend so much time in their gardens.
And don`t worry that this is another one of those glossy celebrity gardener stories that will make you feel insecure about what`s going on in your back yard. As you`ll see, that glamorous news anchor who looks so confident on your TV screen may have even worse cutworm problems than you do.
Barry Kreisler
As president of Matanky Realty Group, one of the city`s biggest real estate firms, Barry Kreisler spends most of his workday operating in high gear.
”At work, I`m intense,” Kreisler acknowledges. ”There are lots of decisions to be made, with serious consequences. I have to use my time efficiently.”
When it`s time to call it quits at the office, though, the 45-year-old executive hops into his Mercedes convertible and heads home to spend some
”intentionally inefficent” time in the garden.
”It`s fun to come home and water plants,” Kreisler says. ”I try to get the last ounce of quality and performance out of things at work, but at home I want to relax, and I find gardening very relaxing. I get plants that will grow well under the care that I give them, and avoid the others. If plants get infested with bugs, I just get different plants. You can`t get too intense about it. You`ve got to enjoy the process rather than worrying about the results.”
Given Kreisler`s laissez-faire attitude, you might figure his garden consists of clumps of can`t-kill-`em orange tiger lilies interspersed with an all-but-indestructible ground cover (kudzu, perhaps). Think again. His Near Northwest Side home boasts more than 8,000 square feet of lawn and garden space, and he has made the most of virtually every inch.
Wisteria trails from a wooden arbor near the front of the house; spireas and flowering crabapple trees dot the side yard. Day lilies, hostas, red cannas, purple clematis, phlox, impatiens, astilbe, fuchsia, geraniums, ferns and begonias grow in beds or hanging baskets. Tomatoes and hot peppers ripen in tubs on the brick back yard patio.
Kreisler recently devoted an entire weekend to building a lily pond with a small waterfall. ”I didn`t dig the hole myself, but I did all the stonemasonry,” he says. ”I knew that would be fun.”
Kreisler, who spends ”probably four or five hours a week” watering and part of his weekends ”weeding and clipping,” says he learned about gardening ”mostly by reading books and doing it.” He bought his home in 1976, but the garden didn`t take shape until the mid-1980s.
”First I concentrated on renovating the house,” explains Kreisler, whose remodeling plans included the addition of a two-story greenhouse. ”Then I started on the yard. When I moved here it was pretty much just lawn.”
Kreisler admits to failure on one back yard project. ”My neighbor and I ordered 15 turtles for our ponds,” he says. ”I thought it would be nice to have turtles, but when they arrived, they were bigger than we expected-about 8 inches across-and they made the pond scuzzy. I don`t have mine any more, though. They all wandered away.”
Linda MacLennan
”The ground war has been launched,” WBBM-Ch. 2 news anchor Linda MacLennan announced recently. But MacLennan wasn`t talking about military assaults in the Persian Gulf or some other combat zone halfway around the world. The battle she was referring to was much closer at hand-in MacLennan`s Lincoln Park courtyard garden, where currently she is engaged in mortal combat with cutworms bent on ravaging her carefully tended flowers.
”Conquering cutworms has become an obsession with me,” MacLennan cheerfully acknowledges. ”I dust with insecticide, but they keep eating everything. If I take many more casualties, I`m going to have to bring in replacement plants.”
Cutworms aren`t MacLennan`s only horticultural challenge. Her enclosed patio is picturesque and private, but the high brick walls mean that the air circulation is less than ideal. She gets direct sun for only about two hours each day, and in-ground gardening space is limited to narrow dirt borders on three sides of the small patio. But that doesn`t stop MacLennan, who uses pots and hanging containers to maximize her available growing space.
”To see me coming out of a garden supply store, you would think I have a two-acre plot,” she says with a laugh.
MacLennan, 35, started gardening six years ago while working at a TV station in Toronto.
”I bought a house there, and it already had a garden,” she says. ”I started reading gardening books and planted gladiolas and dahlias in the spring. I was working the early morning show at the station there, and I would get up at 3:30 a.m. and be home by noon to putter in the garden.
”When I first started gardening, I didn`t admit it or talk about it with my friends, because it seemed like something our parents did. Now lots of younger people garden.”
MacLennan, who moved to Chicago five years ago, grows day lilies, hydrangeas, begonias, fuchsias, columbines, irises, petunias, ferns, rhododendrons, impatiens and azaleas in flower beds; she plants masses of petunias in clay pots and a lightweight hanging box. A large redbud tree in one corner was set out by a nursery.
”A whole bunch of things about gardening appeal to me,” she says. ”I love looking at the different colors, and I like the challenge of mixing different plants and figuring out what colors and heights and textures look good together. My garden is modest, but you do what you can with what you have. I love having this little oasis of color and tranquility.”
Bob Sirott and Carrie Cochran
And now, a horticultural hint from Bob Sirott:
”When the soil around a plant is hard as a rock, there are no leaves on the plant and your wife isn`t speaking to you, it means that the plant is dead and you should have watered it more,” Sirott says. ”It`s a sure sign of trouble, botanical and marital.”
Sirott, the boyishly irrepressible 41-year-old co-anchor of WMAQ-Ch.5`s
”First Thing in the Morning,” doesn`t pretend to have a green thumb. The resident gardener in the Sirott-Cochran household is Carrie Cochran, a former anchor/reporter for WBBM-Ch. 2 who now does occasional independent TV production work. Cochran`s thumb is as green as they come, and lately she has been trying to sell Sirott on the joys of the soil.
”Gardening has taught me so much,” says Cochran, 40, who became a
”bulb nut” around 10 years ago and went on from there. ”Television is filled with people like me, who are focused on getting everything into an 8-second sound bite and doing everything on deadline. Gardening is different. It has taught me that you can`t control everything. You just do your best. You plant something, and it may grow or it may not. Some years you get crabgrass, some years you get clover. But I love everything about it, from the dirt to the failures.”
”Gardening is hard work, though,” Sirott deadpans plaintively. ”I don`t like to work hard or get my fingernails dirty. That`s why I got into TV.”
”Bob`s lack of knowledge of plants was remarkable,” Cochran says. ”But recently, he dug holes for two of my bushes, and sometimes he comes along with me on trips to garden centers. He`s responsible for the indoor plants;
unfortunately, they`re all covered with mealybugs. And he`s able to recognize several flowers now, including roses and hollyhocks.”
Roses, hollyhocks, lilies, day lilies, columbines and clematis flourish in the back and side yards of the couple`s Logan Square area home. Pink impatiens, astilbe and cannas surround a nostalgic silver gazing ball set on a pedestal in the side yard; a 5-by-12-foot vegetable garden in the back boasts zucchini, tomatoes, peppers and cantaloupes.
Cochran did all of the flower beds and landscaping herself but had the trees, including an ornamental pear, dogwoods and purple plum, installed professionally.
”I wish we had a golden chain tree,” she says. ”I had two of them put in, but they both died.” So did the honey locust tree that Sirott and Cochran planted in 1982 as a first wedding anniversary present to themselves.
”It wasn`t a good omen,” Cochran jokes. ”But we got another one and it`s doing fine.”
If one thing doesn`t work, Cochran simply tries something else-charting her horticultural course partly by intellect and partly by instinct. Her recipe for success? ”I read all the gardening advice that I can get my hands on,” she explains, ”and then I ignore it all.”
Maria Rodriguez
At Maria Rodriguez Design, a Chicago-based women`s sportswear firm that supplies clothing to more than 400 stores across the country, the business day starts early-company founder Maria Rodriguez is in her office by 7:15 a.m. But she always manages to pay a visit to her garden before setting off for work.
”I like to say hello to everybody,” says Rodriguez, who tends to speak of her plants as individual personalities. ”Actually, I almost hate to go to work in the summer. I want to spend the morning sprinkling everybody down and clipping my roses instead. I love watching the plants grow.”
In the three years since Rodriguez and husband Brad Cole moved into their home, set on a double lot on Chicago`s North Side, the designer has turned the back yard into a shady oasis complete with pond and fountain. Here you`ll find fuchsias in hanging baskets, tubs of geraniums, impatiens, petunias, tiger lilies and a variety of perennials.
Hostas, which Rodriguez refers to as her ”happy plants” (”They always look like they`re smiling when they come up in the spring, and I love the shade of green”) grow thickly around the pond and serve as ground cover; day lilies, daisies, iris, hollyocks and petunias brighten the front yard. In the side yard, Rodriguez recently planted 15 climbing roses in memory of her sister, who died last year in Santa Fe.
”She grew roses in Santa Fe,” Rodriguez says, ”and her memorial service was held in a rose garden. This summer I decided that I wanted to grow roses, too.”
Rodriguez, 40, grew up in Chicago in a gardening family; her mother, grandmother and aunts garden. But she didn`t have space for her own garden until she moved to her current home. Gardening, she believes, ”teaches me patience. I feel like I`m only a helper in the garden. Ultimately it`s up to the plant and its environment whether it grows or not.”
She buys little from garden catalogs, preferring to shop at garden supply centers.
”I like to buy annuals with buds so you have instant gratification,”
Rodriguez says. ”I`ll go to a garden center and come home with seven or eight flats of annuals at a time. My husband just shakes his head when he sees all those flowers; he`s not really interested in gardening.
”I like perennials, too, because with them you have surprises all summer. You forget how lovely they are, and then they bloom.”
Rodriguez spends at least two evenings a week working in the garden. ”I do the tour,” she says. ”You have to do the little things, like pulling weeds, constantly so there`s not too much to do all at once. And I`m always in the garden on Saturdays and Sundays. We like to have breakfast on our back porch deck on weekends. It`s so nice to be out there looking at the flowers and listening to the birds.”
Joe Drummond
For 10 hours a day, six days a week, Joe Drummond deals with stressful details in double-time. As a production stage manager at the Goodman Theatre, where he`s currently overseeing ”Book of the Night,” his job involves coping with everything from ”artistic temperament” to toppling scenery.
”Not long ago, we were eight minutes into a show when a scenic piece fell over and knocked out a crew member,” Drummond recalls with a shudder.
”We couldn`t do the production without him; so we had to cancel the show that night.”
How does Drummond, a production manager for the past 17 years, deal with the pressure? He grows vegetables. ”Gardening provides the diversion I need,” he says. ”All day long at work, people are telling me what to do. I have to deal with people`s tempers, stroke their egos, keep everybody calm. In the garden, I can be in control.”
Drummond, who gardens on a 10-by-15-foot plot in the back yard of his family`s home in Rogers Park, grows red cabbage, beans, broccoli, lettuce, cucumbers, green peppers, herbs, tomatoes and the yellow squash that he considers to be his specialty. Unfortunately, the squash invariably is attacked by squash borers.
”I do battle with the borers every year,” Drummond says. Because of health and safety concerns for their two young children, he and his wife, Sara (who grows flowers), avoid chemical pesticides, preferring to rely on organic and barrier methods.
”This year I`m trying something new,” Drummond says optimistically.
”It`s my own invention. The borers lay eggs at the base of the squash plants; so I put a nylon stocking over the plant and then put an orange juice can over that. The stocking expands as the plants grow, but they`re protected.” Other ”home remedies” in the couple`s organic arsenal include a potion made of vinegar, garlic and red peppers. ”We mix it up and squirt it on the plants,” Drummond explains.
Drummond, 42, can`t remember a time when he wasn`t interested in gardening.
”It has always just been part of my chemistry,” he says. ”My mother grew up in New Jersey, but we moved to a farm in Alabama when I was young, and we were into growing all those Southern foods like okra and squash and black- eyed peas. One of the earliest home movies of me shows me with a corn plant with 14 ears on it. As a kid, I would go to the garden and pull up things and eat them.”
Drummond often can be found in the garden at 7 a.m., weeding, watering and inspecting for bugs and worms.
”I like the solitude of going out to the garden every morning,” he says. ”Some days I don`t even do any work at all; I just drink a cup of coffee and stare at the plants. It gets the day off to a nice, low-key start.”
