Garden designer Ryan Gainey may be the most interesting thing to bloom in Atlanta since the dogwood.
An ingenious salesman who could (and once did) sell people sand, Gainey is an inexhaustible, opinionated, blunt, arrogant, wickedly funny,
charismatic, ferocious original, a man who knows who he is in a world where most of us haven`t a clue.
”He`s a package of dichotomies,” says Dennis Moye, who has known Gainey for seven years. ”One day he`ll be driven out to an estate, doing business on a car phone; the next day he`ll be home washing out dog food cans to use for tussie-mussies (fresh flower nosegays).”
Anne Cox Chambers, chairman of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, flies him to France several times a year for what he calls ”continual refinement of her garden, both horticulturally and architecturally.” Mrs. Herbert Ross (the former Princess Lee Radziwill, Jackie Onassis`s sister) has trudged by his side on the grounds of her Long Island, N.Y., estate while he oversaw the installation of her rose garden and other gardening projects.
Humble, he`s not. But Gainey, 47, hasn`t shot to gardening stardom by being modest. ”I am probably the most written-about gardener and my garden the most-photographed garden in America today,” he says.
He may be right. Numerous magazines have photographed his floral rhapsody of a cottage garden in Atlanta`s Druid Hills. In May, National Geographic named him one of America`s top five garden designers. August`s HG devotes six glossy pages (and its cover) to Gainey. Metropolitan Home just called.
But there`s more. Gainey is one of Atlanta`s toniest ”event” designers- from romantic weddings to charitable galas. He owns three garden shops. He`s a poet and an artist, a lecturer and mentor, a philosopher and entrepreneur.
Yeah, you say, but what`s he really like?
It`s just money, dear
Gainey is on the job, strolling with a society matron through the garden of her Jacksonville, Fla., estate.
Gainey: ”And of course you must get rid of this . . . and this . . . change that . . . build this . . . move that.”
Society matron: ”But, Ryan, if we do all this, we`ll have to rob a bank!”
Gainey: ”Do you have a gun?”
Wherever he is, Gainey usually can be found doing what he does best:
passing judgment.
He does many things well-grows things, designs things, fashions things, sells things. But ultimately, his greatest gift is a discerning eye unhampered by vocal cowardice. People pay him $200 an hour for this gift. George Washington was never so brutally honest.
Here`s Gainey at work, according to Brooks Garcia, his former personal assistant:
Gainey: ”Those photinias have got to go.”
Client: ”Can`t we do something with them?”
Gainey: ”You can stuff a lot of trash cans.”
His candor has led to charges that he`s arrogant. ”Arrogant? They just don`t want to hear the truth!” says Gainey . . . well, candidly.
Another charge is that he`s self-involved. The story goes that someone emerged from a job interview with Gainey, saying, ”That was an interview? All he did was talk about himself!”
”No doubt about it. In the creative realm, he`s a genius,” says Tom Woodham, Gainey`s business partner for 19 years.
Apparently, that genius at work is something to behold. One witness, Nita Robinson-Gainey designed her daughter`s wedding last spring-provides this account:
”Ryan would be saying things, and it was like he`d go off to another dimension, and then he`d come back, sketch something, and it`d be exactly what we were dreaming of.”
`Ryan`s world`
”He just lives in his own world, Ryan`s world; does things the way he wants to do them, and that`s why people think he`s arrogant,” Garcia says.
Gainey is by the screen door in the kitchen of his 1906 bungalow, playing doorman for his itinerant pack of pets (four cats, four dogs), espousing philosophical snippets (”There is no truth. There are truths”), quoting Syrian poet Kahlil Gibran.
Even in faded work clothes, he is a presence. (For formal occasions he decks himself in colorful robes and shawls. When he travels, he says, he doesn`t pack clothes: ”I pack accessories.”)
With his thinning copper hair, solid frame, parched skin, hooked nose, prominent cheekbones and hooded brown eyes, he looks like a rugged, balding Robert Mitchum who has never heard of sunscreen.
”I knew what I was about when I was 3,” he announces.
Asked to explain, he says: ”The soul is the link between the heart and mind.”
Huh? He tries again: ”You must be willing to be exactly who you are and do good with it . . . and I was standing in my crib, and I felt my soul and I stepped into it. And whatever I had to do to be me, I went out and did.”
He came into this world Ryan Jennings Catoe Gainey in Hartsville, S.C., the middle child in a brood of five born to sharecropper parents.
”I learned my lessons well,” he says of his childhood, ”how to root a camellia under the barn, how to pick cotton, crop tobacco, get yourself dressed up and go to town.”
He worked his way through Clemson University, studying horticulture, but left after 4 1/2 years (”I realized I`d never pass chemistry”) to join the Navy. He spent two years at sea as a corpsman.
After the Navy, he worked as a nurse, then a farmhand, while saving money for a garden-hopping tour of Europe.
When he returned, he moved to Atlanta and worked six months for a florist. Then in 1972 he opened his first shop, The Potted Plant, with Tom Woodham and Eve Davis, two gardening friends from Clemson.
You really need this sand
That`s when he sold the sand. People loved Gainey`s imaginative colored-sand terrariums, his gardening tips, his flair, what Nancy Novogrod, editor in chief of HG, calls his ”humble Southern shack thing as interpreted through the eyes of clear 1990s sophistication.”
”He`s a remarkable salesman, whether he`s selling products or himself,” Woodham says.
Davis left after a year, but Gainey and Woodham stayed and their business thrived.
They opened two other stores: The Cottage Garden and The Connoisseur`s Garden. Gainey branched out into party and wedding design.
In 1980, Gainey bought a cottage on a half-acre-with two trees and several dilapidated greenhouses. He immediately set to work designing and planting his private garden of Eden, a series of small, intimate garden spaces where flowers burst from the earth in explosions of color, where cool ”green rooms” of native plants beckon, and peace and harmony reign.
Most days, he says, ”The birds wake me up and I start my bath, make my coffee, and, knowing somewhere in the world someone is up, I start making my phone calls, networking.”
He`ll call his friend garden writer Rosemary Verey in England; overseas clients, nursery owners.
Then he`s off with all four dogs packed into his van to visit the shops. When he comes home at night, it`s the morning ritual in reverse. While dinner bubbles on the stove, Gainey lights a Marlboro (he only smokes at night), pours a glass of wine, then sinks into the bathtub and calls his friends.
A non-stop pace
He lives simply, tends his garden, throws small dinner parties for his
”network” (a group of fellow gardeners, poets and artists) and studies.
Gainey seems driven to learn everything. A voracious reader, he plows through esoteric tomes like a power lawnmower (”The Tombs of Tarquinia”
because he and Woodham are conducting a tour of Italy; ”Decorative Folding Screens” because of a show he`s producing). And when he`s not reading, he`s planning more projects: an illustrated book of poetry, a Christmas show at the Fernbank Science Center, a line of garden accessories called the Ryan Gainey Collection.
”I just don`t quit,” he says.
But some things do end. On April 30, one day short of their 20th year together, the Gainey-Woodham business partnership ended amicably. Woodham wanted to devote more time to writing, and Gainey, like the Energizer Rabbit, just wanted to keep going and going and going.
But wherever that place is he`s traveling to, one thing is certain:
Gainey knows he will be noticed.
Like the day he turned heads while walking through Paris` Orly Airport. At the end of the concourse, Gainey-in full Gaineyesque attire: multicolored robe and shawl, wide-brimmed straw hat, yellow Giorgio Armani sunglasses with lenses the size and color of black olives-turned to his companion, winked and said: ”Well, I guess they`ve never seen anyone famous before.”
