Golf writer comes out of the gardening closet
News & Record
April 16, 2006
Other than a nearly spiritual love of the movie Caddyshack, and a dismal afternoon on a putting range with my grandfather more than a decade ago, I have absolutely no experience with golf. So, it’s not surprising that until I picked up Beautiful Madness: One Man’s Journey Through Other People’s Gardens, I had never heard of author James Dodson. Dodson has not just made a living writing about golf, he is a golf-writing superstar. His collaboration with Arnold Palmer, A Golfer’s Life, was a New York Times bestseller. His column in Golf Magazine has won the prestigious Golf writers of America Award four times. In 1998, he won the Golf Reporter of the Year Award by the International Network of Golf.
But Dodson has a dirty little secret, one which he exposes in Beautiful Madness: he is a gardening junkie. Banish from your mind images of little old ladies in a straw hats tending the pansies circling their mailboxes; Dodson’s obsession involves backhoes, secret rendezvous with his horticulture supplier, and the artful dodging of his wife’s inquiries as to the expense of his latest ornamental shrubberies.
Much like Thomas Jefferson, Patron Saint of Late-in-Life Gardeners, Dodson’s gardening bug didn’t present until well into adulthood though he was infected as a child right here in Greensboro.
“I evidently inherited [a love of gardening] from both my gardening-mad parents,” writes Dodson, “and several generations of God-fearing, church-loving, plant-crazy North Carolina farmers and preachers who believed digging into the soil wasn’t just tantamount to delving into the soul but also probably essential for any hope of slipping into paradise.”
Dodson’s gardening obsession bloomed when he and his then-pregnant wife bought a 12 acre auto graveyard off a dirt road in Maine. He would come to call this piece of land “Slightly Off in the Woods” to reflect both the garden and the state of mind of the gardener. In the middle of decades-old rusted-out cars stood a forty-year-old American beech which, at the start of his Beautiful Madness journey, is inexplicably dying.
What began as an attempt to find the cure for his beloved tree became a transcontinental trek though all means of horticultural displays: gardening shows, specialist nurseries, renowned gardens and more than a few amateur backyard marvels. Dodson writes about everything from the 7,000-square-foot mock-up of Polynesian temple ruins covered in orchids to a newly bred hybrid daylily called “Havana Day Dreaming” with a jaunty excitement that will engage even the least garden-savvy reader.
His jauntiness, however, sometimes becomes a little too cute, making the reader wade through verbose descriptions and adorable nicknames to get to the meat of the story. For example, Dodson repeatedly refers to Thomas Jefferson as “Uncle Tom,” a description meant to be endearing but was in fact more distracting; I got lost thinking of the implications of using such a historically weighted nickname to refer to a man who was not only one of our founding fathers but also a slave owner.
Nevertheless, I was enchanted by Dodson’s enthusiasm. His passionate reporting added the Philadelphia Flower Show and a trip to Monticello to my mental travel list, and set me to daydreaming about the possibilities for my own overgrown backyard.
Every year, Dodson hires a backhoe artist, Pothead Eddie (so called for obvious reasons), to reshape the very foundation upon which, in the next abbreviated Maine growing season, Dodson will attempt his most recent vision of the perfect garden. The process of creating a horticultural display of that scale is painstaking and tedious, a true lesson in patience, but the work pales in comparison to the exquisite payoff. Beautiful Madness is much the same way.