A Conversation With James Farmer, Author of “A Time to Plant”

The dry way to describe James Farmer is to say that he is a landscape designer who also does floral and interior design. The truth is more poetic, and more holistic. Farmer grew up in Kathleen, Georgia, and still resides there; he is a proponent of Southern-style “garden living,” a concept he explores in his new book, A Time to Plant. Farmer spent his childhood at his grandma Mimi’s elbow, watching her cook and make flower arrangements with plants straight of the garden.Though he travels to big cities, he is still deeply attached to middle Georgia, allowing its landscape and culture to influence his designs. We spoke to Farmer by phone about the new book, his Grandma Mimi, and what it means to be deeply attached to place. Farmer will be in St. Louis to read from and sign A Time to Plant: Southern-Style Garden Living (Gibbs Smith) on September 10 at Left Bank Books’ CWE location (399 Euclid) at 2 p.m. For more information, visit left-bank.com.

At Home: You’ve got a pretty active landscaping and interior design practice; how did you find time to write a book?

James Farmer: Well, the book just became a compendium to my design practice, whether it be running into clients or potential customers at a nursery or a store somewhere; it became an opportunity to have a voice that could go out to more than just that client, but to many people. I may not be able to stand in their home or in their garden, but they can read some things and be inspired by what I’ve done in the garden, or in people’s homes, and really just enrich their lives with the garden lifestyle is what I like to say. So this was my opportunity to have a broader reach, and just a voice to teach and inspire people to live with the garden, in the garden, and in a way where they are enriched by the garden.

AH: For people who aren’t familiar with the “garden lifestyle” concept, could you talk about that a little bit, and what you mean by that?

JF: To me, the garden lifestyle, or garden living, is that some aspect of your day-to-day life, whether it’s just a meal or whatever it is, is inspired and enhanced by the garden, or is garden-based. So let’s say that you’re eating a bowl of cereal for breakfast, which so many people do, so maybe the fruit on that cereal you grew in you’re garden. That’s a part of garden living. Or maybe the arrangement on your dinner table is some beautiful roses or hydrangeas or something right from your garden that you’ve been able to grow and cut, and make your table a delightful place. Or it could be that you’re cooking, and you want just a little bit of rosemary. You can grow rosemary in your own garden, even if you have a downtown apartment. You can have a little balcony and a little pot of herbs out there. It could be the simplest of things, flavoring your life with what you’ve grown, or it could be major, where you are using the garden for your sustenance. So garden living is letting the garden have some influence, some base, some inspiration from the garden.

AH: I know you grew up like that, in the South, and your grandmother was the primary influence there.

JF: She was. Our family cook as well. Between Mimi and Miss Mary, who cooked for us, if it wasn’t fresh and in season, we weren’t eating it. So we didn’t have watermelon and tomatoes in January, but we did all through the summer, because it was so fresh and available. So the thought process we grew up with is called hyperseasonal. If I can shake the hand of the farmer who grew it, I know it was grown very close by, and it was grown so close that it was on a tree or a vine the morning of the day I’m eating it. That was a major influence for me, to be able to have these women in my life. My grandfather’s a great gardener as well. With the surname Farmer, we got our name somehow down the line of growing things! But that was very influential. But even things like the herbs that grow in our area are what seasoned the dishes, so it’s taking that traditional Southern cooking an flavoring it with what is in the South, but to the southern seasons. 

AH: You have some of Mimi’s recipes in the book, right?

JF: I do, I do! I’ve got a sprinkling of her recipes. Some are even some hand-written ones that were from some of her old cookbooks.

AH: Ah, yeah, I saw the recipe for blackberry jam on your website! It’s got a little cartoon of a fly with his foot stuck in it, right?

JF: Right! Isn’t that a hoot? That’s from an old illustrated cookbook, which was old when my grandmother got it. It was a wedding present. My grandparents have been married for 55 years, and Mimi says it was ancient when she married, so I love having that, because it just shows where we are now, even though we have access to so many things all of the time, back in the day, the quality of life, food-wise, wasn’t any worse. It was maybe even better. The whole organic movement, the farm-to-table movement, and the know-your-farmer movement—that was it! That’s how grandparents grew up and raised my mother and her siblings, and how we were raised as well.

AH: You’re still in Kathleen, Georgia, but I’m sure you’ve got your own garden now.

JF: I do. I have a small garden, because a garden can feed an army [laughs]. I mainly grow flowers and herbs. My grandaddy grows a few vegetables. And friends of ours have gardens, and during the summer a couple of weeks go by, and I think, I can’t eat another tomato. How did these bushes, these vines, make so many tomatoes? So there are recipes like squash-spoon bread or Uncle Hoyt’s pickles that preserve or use some of the excess vegetables in a fun way.

AH: So I’m guessing Mimi canned and put stuff up?

JF: Absolutely. I’m looking at some fig jam that Mimi put up just a little while ago, that’s sitting here on my counter. That was part of the custom, to be able to eat things later on, because the growing season is very long, so we can grow a lot of things and can a lot of things, but during the dead of winter it’s so nice to be able to open up a can of summer vegetable soup with those wonderful summer vegetables that you’ve put up. So canning is a major part of our lifestyle. In my grandparents’ church, there are ladies, that’s all they do is just can and then sell them for $3 or $5, these big jars and it’s amazing how much better that tastes than just something out of a can from the grocery store.

AH: Your whole take on this, you’re combining the heirloom stuff and making it contemporary.

JF: That’s a way to sum it up—to me, heirlooms should be used, rather than being stuffed in a box or in a memory, it’s just that it’s that connection to the past. It’s healthy as well, so there’s a benefit there, and there’s economic advantages as well, because when you grow your own herbs, you save on buying herbs at the grocery store every week. So there’s lots of ways to it, but to me it’s just such a great way to stay connected to the past, and my generation—I’m 29—my generation has no clue that, wow, I can really grow a tomato and eat it? And grow the basil with it? And now I have the beginnings of a Caprese salad right there. The thought process that you can do this, for my generation, is so great, but it allows, it gives me the excuse to talk to the greatest generation, like my grandparents’ generation, and have a conversation with them, because they’re just itching to pour this information and knowledge into the younger generation. I’m glad to be that vehicle.

AH: What are some other aspects of the book you hope people pick up on?

JF: There are a few things that I want people to know about gardening—one, that it’s attainable, you can garden, whether you live downtown or on a major farm. So I want people open the book and think, “Oh! I could do that!” What I’d really love for people to take away, is knowing a few things about your neck of the woods, whether it’s that magnolias grow well there, or knowing how to snip or cultivate. Because knowing a few basics can make you look like a better gardener than you are, because nature takes its own course. When you take nature and nurture it, that’s when you have a successful garden. So people can look to the garden and think, oh, this can be easy, this is something I can do. If my book can inspire people to garden living, I feel like I’ve done a good thing.

AH: Your book is an interesting hybrid, in that it’s a coffee table book with concrete information on how to garden.

JF: Honestly, that’s the goals of this book, not to be a just to be just a book sitting there on your coffee table collecting dust, and then after a couple of years of sitting there you put it up on a shelf and never look at it again. I hope that the pages are earmarked, that the recipe pages are smudged with butter…I really want it to be a compendium to your lifestyle. I really want people to be able to have this book and years from now, say, “That wasn’t just a flash in the pan. I have cooked that menu in that book so many times”—there’s a menu for each season. People say, oh, I love your book, it’s such a pretty book. And I say thank you, but I want a year from now, five or ten or twenty years from now, I want people to say, that book really is a classic. That would be to me a great success.

AH: You’re in the South, with a long growing season. Say someone buys your book, but they’re up in Minnesota, and needs more detailed information about the growing season in their area—what sources do you recommend?

JF: One of my favorite go-to sources for information anywhere in the country is The Farmer’s Almanac. It’s broken up, so it tells you when to plant these seeds, these transplants, these roots, or these vegetables. It gives you rough weather patterns—I even plan some events according to the Farmer’s Almanac. So if I have a client who approaches me and says, ‘My daughter wants a spring wedding,” and I’m thinking OK, well, early March in the deep South can be real windy, but if you look in the Farmer’s Almanac it’ll say from this week to this week, this is the typical pattern. It takes patterns and takes the cadence of nature—another thing I harp in the book about—learning those cycles and using them to your benefit. Now, of course there are things we can’t predict, but at the same time, the Farmer’s Almanac can help someone in Minneapolis or down in Kathleen, Georgia. It’s one of my go-tos.

 AH: One of the fascinating things about your book, at least to me, is that it represents an unbroken lineage in terms of being connected to land and history. The locavore movement is amazing, but it feels like they’re missing that connection to something larger, which I guess is because a lot of younger people are longing for that connection, but they don’t have a direct connection to it, like you did with your grandmother Mimi. Right now, it’s a trend, rather than arising out of lived experience. Because the pattern from the 20th century on was to grow up in the middle of America, and then bam! Detach yourself from your place, head out to one of the coasts, and reinvent yourself.

JF:An interesting phrase I’ve heard is “it’s generations away from the land.” My generation is either the third or second in history, since antiquity, where they’re actually the children of those who were already removed from the land. My grandparents grew up on a farm. I grew up on a farm, so I’m not necessarily removed from the land. Then there are kids I went to school with who lived and worked in Atlanta. Their grandparents lived and worked in Atlanta. Their great-grandparents probably grew up on a farm, and eventually moved to Atlanta. So this removed from the land is a very new thing. Of course, you’ve got major metropolitan areas like New York and Chicago, but countrywide, there really isn’t…it’s like a cycle that’s being broken. There are one or two generations removed from the land. Very soon, they reconnect, because they realize you can’t be removed from the land. You have to have that landbase. I love that thought that, OK, we’ve spent five generations within the city of Atlanta, but we have a farm outside of town and that’s our weekend place, or our hobby place. I love that people are breaking that cycle. At least one kid out of the generation is doing that, and coming back to the land. I have a friend who’s a fifth-generation peach farmer. Well, his sister lives in Atlanta and has nothing to do with peaches except for eating them in the summertime, but he made that decision after going to Lake Forest [College], that, you know what? I really want to be connected to the land. I want to be able to continue the family business. I like that my generation is seeing this trend, and maybe turning it more from a trend to a true way of life. Even if you live in the city, you can know who grew your food, and places like Whole Foods and Fresh Market and local farmer’s markets have done such a great job about that. I know that sounds crazy, “removed from the land,” but I think it’s something that people are correcting that, in a way.