Oxalis at $2.50 a pot...

Press, Volume CXIV, Issue 33516, 23 April 1974, Page 6

Oxalis at $2.50 a pot...

A New Zealander, Mr Kerry Fitzgerald, has a thriving business in New York. Angela Taylor, writing in the “New York Times,” describes his shop as the most attractive garden shop in town.

As a boy in New Zealand he found gardening a bore. And livestock, which his father farmed, even more so. His mother was always pressing him to help, he recalled. “Oxalis is a weed there, I used to have to pull it up,” he said. “We get $2.50 a pot for it here.”

Somehow, his mother’s love of gardens rubbed off on him, and when he went to work doing public relations for Alitalia, he took advantage of his travel privileges to explore gardens all over the world. He spent some time working at Kew Gardens in England, but found city gardens more challenging. 17th AND IRVING That’s why, when he came to New York tn 1967, he went right to Philip Truex, who owned the original City Gardener on Third Avenue, and asked to work with him. When Mr Truex retired a year later, Mr Fitzgerald took over the business. Recently, he moved his designers, horticulturists and assistants to what might easily be the most attractive garden shop in town, on the corner of 17th Stteet and irving Place. “It’s a gardening neighbourhood,” he said, “with Gramercy Park and the brownstones in the area.” The red brick shop is on two levels: the street floor has plants arrayed on shelves or hanging from the ceiling. Below, in what used to be the basement, Mr Fitzgerald has created a sunken jungle guarded over by a large painted wood figure of the Japanese goddess of gardens.

A white ceramic figure sits silently near the fountain and the splashing sound of water mingles with the recorded hoots of owls. (The live parrot remains aloof in its cage, refusing to compete with the taped birds.) PLANTS RESPOND . . . Kerry Fitzgerald doesn’t talk to plants. He doesn’t sing or pray to them, either. However, he does play recorded bird calls for the greenery in his shop, in between a bit of Bach or Mozart. He thinks plants re-

spond to love, and like pets, have individual needs. In addition to the shop, the tall, handsome proprietor has living and working quarters any New Yorker would envy:

, a turn-of-the-century carriage house, close to but detached i from the shop. Its main livs ing room, with brick walls, s narrow Gothic windows and : a brisk little fire burning in

the hearth, also serves as an office where clients may consult Sueo Miyagawa, a landscape designer adept at gardens of all sorts.

Mr Fitzgerald has designed some wondrous gardens both [indoors and outdoors in the : supposedly hostile atmosphere of New York. He finds the varying climate of New York terraces a special challenge. Wherever he can, he likes to work out his clients’ pet ideas: a grape arbor above Fifth Avenue, raspberry bushes on 57th Street. VEGETABLES

For a family whose landlord objected to having any plantings on the terrace floor, he solved things by grouping trees and flowers in large boxes, which in turn were set on castors so they could be moved around for different effects (“and taken with them if they move”). With food prices rising, more people, he said, are asking for vegetable gardens in town — “It’s like the victory garden thing during the war.” Only a happy few the luxury of terraces: most New Yorkers exercise their green thumbs on potted plants indoors and they can be enormous fun, he said.