Tony Avent has spent 31 years running Plant Delights Nursery and developing Juniper Level Botanic Garden near Raleigh, N.C., catering to plant connoisseurs across the country. An exit strategy involves preserving his life’s work. (Madeline Gray/For The Washington Post) Tony Avent runs two enterprises out of what was once a hardscrabble tobacco farm 20 minutes south of Raleigh, N.C. The first, Plant Delights Nursery, will this year ship 120,000 novel and pricey ornamental plants to garden enthusiasts across the United States. The other endeavor is a botanical garden of Avent’s invention, filled with rare and unusual plants that the 62-year-old plantsman has collected on 80 expeditions in the States and 12 other countries. Supplementing those with plants from other collectors, he has amassed 26,000 species and varieties and has a collection greater than many public botanical gardens in the country. Juniper Level Botanic Garden is his way of preserving the biodiversity of garden-worthy plants at risk of being lost. It is also a botanical smorgasbord assembled to sate the insatiable: one man’s appetite for plants. Avent is one of the most enduring figures in the arcane world of elite horticulture, and his passion has found its way, plant by plant, into countless thousands of gardens across the country over the past 31 years. Avent himself has been at the center of a golden age of collector-growers selling to enthusiasts and connoisseurs, and his eventual exit from this prominent gardening stage will end a remarkable chapter in American horticulture. Lycoris x rosea Pink-A-Blue. (Madeline Gray/For The Washington Post) Albizia Merlot Magic. (Madeline Gray/For The Washington Post) That exit is not so far off. Last year, he and his wife, Anita, announced that they were donating the botanical garden to North Carolina State University and planned to phase out the nursery as a large-scale enterprise (garden members will have access to some plants). The Avents are raising money for an endowment before the transition. Blunt, funny, charismatic and hewing to no cultural sensibility except his own, Avent cannot be counted on to make dreamy observations about his life’s work, or tell […]
Source: www.washingtonpost.com
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