Born to a Family of Sharecroppers, This Topiary Artist Overcame Discrimination to Become the ‘Picasso of Plants’

Self-taught artist Pearl Fryar, who died this month at age 86, got his start when he tried to win an award from his local garden club. He ended up becoming a celebrity in the horticultural world

Michele Debczak | Correspondent

April 14, 2026

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For proof that topiary can be high art, look no further than the work of Pearl Fryar. The self-taught artist used shrubs and trees as his medium, and he was known as the “Picasso of Plants” during his decades-long career. Fryar died in his home in Bishopville, South Carolina, on April 4 at age 86, leaving behind a legacy in the world of ornamental gardening and acres of living art.

Born to a family of sharecroppers in North Carolina in 1939, Fryar lived a full life before getting into topiary, as Penelope Green reports for the New York Times. He served in Korea as a chemical weapons specialist for the U.S. Army, then worked in can manufacturing in New York.

When he transferred to a factory in South Carolina in the late 1970s, he and his wife planned to buy a house in Bishopville, but they soon ran into trouble. Fryar said that a white resident had told his real estate agent that he didn’t want a Black couple living in the neighborhood, citing a racist stereotype that they wouldn’t take care of their yard.

The couple settled on a property farther away, but Fryar didn’t forget the comment. With three acres of land at his disposal, he got to work transforming his double lot into his own personal Eden, complete with decorative trees and flowerbeds. His goal was to win the Yard of the Month award from his local garden club. When he learned he wasn’t eligible for the honor because his home technically sat outside Bishopville, that only pushed him harder. With no formal education besides a three-minute lesson from the owner of his local nursery (plus a knowledge of plants gained from his childhood spent helping out on the family farm), he began sculpting more elaborate topiaries, eventually earning the attention of the garden club and receiving the award in 1986.

“I fall under the category of what they call a self-taught artist,” Fryar once told Jubilat’s Terrance Hayes. “Horticulturalists are constantly saying I shouldn’t be able to do this. I’m doing it because I don’t know the rules. I do what I want to do according to the way I feel.”

In Western civilization, the art of topiary dates back at least to ancient Roman times; Pliny the Younger described shrubs at a villa in Tuscany that had been shaped into figures and letters. More than 1,000 years ago, people in China cultivated and trimmed trees into shapes, and by the 14th century, the art of bonsai in Japan was documented in picture scrolls.

During the Renaissance, elaborate pleasure gardens saw a resurgence in Europe. Topiary featured at Hampton Court Palace in England by the end of the 16th century and at Versailles in France by the end of the 17th century.

It was during this era that the traditional shapes associated with topiary emerged: balls, cubes and cones, with a focus on symmetry and uniformity. Fryar’s pruning style broke this mold. His shapes were often free-form, more closely resembling something found in an abstract painting than a geometry textbook. And throughout his property, Fryar installed sculptures he called his “junk art,” which he built out of found metal, reports the Washington Post’s Harrison Smith.

Not long after winning his first gardening prize, Fryar became famous outside South Carolina for his bold topiary art. He was featured on such shows as “CBS Sunday Morning” and “The Martha Stewart Show,” and in 2006 he was the subject of the documentary A Man Named Pearl.

Even after becoming a celebrity in the horticultural world, Fryar kept his home the primary site of his art, and over the years it grew into a local attraction, at one point drawing close to 10,000 visitors a year, according to the Post and Courier’s Riley Edenbeck. The hundreds of plant sculptures around his property included a 40-foot-wide message spelled out in eight-foot letters.

“The last thing you see before you leave my garden is ‘Love, Peace + Goodwill,’” Fryar told David Quick of the Post and Courier in 2017. “So now, my garden not only appeals to the eye, but it appeals to you emotionally because you’re going to feel differently when you leave than when you came.”

His yard remained free and open to the public throughout his lifetime. It’s now managed by Pearl Fryar Topiary Garden, a nonprofit that plans to maintain it as a living memorial to the horticultural legend.

Michele Debczak | Read More

Michele Debczak is a writer and editor based in Brooklyn, New York. She appears in seasons four through six of History Channel’s “The Food That Built America,” and her work has been featured in Mental Floss, IndieWire, Eater and Vice.