Sunday, May 25, 2008 12:43 AM CDT
'I've gardened all my life': Shobe finds job tending the grounds
at EIU not much like work
By Bonnie Clark, Features Writer
For Larry Shobe, grounds gardener at Eastern Illinois University, gardening is not a hobby and, although he’s a paid employee, it seldom seems like a job.
“It’s definitely lifestyle,” he says.
A drive down South 10th Street in Charleston where Shobe lives might well provide a view of more varieties of trees and plants in one garden than could be found nearly anywhere else.
In the spring, Shobe’s favorite time of year, the colors in the garden are spectacular, ranging from shades of red, pink, lavender and deep purple to yellow and orange.
Although he doesn’t know exactly how many plants and trees are growing in the large garden, it has 50 varieties of peonies alone.
There is no grass lawn at Shobe’s house, only a narrow path that winds its way through the three-lot garden.
“I’ve gardened all my life,” he said, “gardened as long as I can remember.”
The originals of several of Shobe’s plants belonged to his great-grandmother. Two of the peonies and a couple of trees remain from the home’s former owners, Leland and Loraine Coleman, who lived there for 45 years.
“My great-grandmother taught me how to propagate from cuttings and how to layer plants when I was 5 to 7 years old,” he said.
Layering, he explained, is one way to start a new plant.
“You dig a little of the ground, pull a lower branch down into it and let the end of the branch stick out, leaving it attached to the tree,” he said.
He leaves it that way for a year and when it’s rooted, he snips it off from the main plant in the spring, digs it up and sets the young flower, shrub or tree in a new place.
“This works for some shrubs and flowers and not for others. It doesn’t work with peonies,” he said.
Shobe said he finds new plants everywhere.
“People give them to me, some came from the neighborhood, others from derelict farms.”
He buys from local nurseries and catalogues, and takes pieces from plants on campus and propagates them. The reverse is also true since he takes cuttings from his garden to plant on campus.
As a boy growing up in Cumberland County between Greenup and Charleston, Shobe said he was fortunate to live on a farm that was half tillable and half wooded with the Embarras River running through it.
“Sunday afternoons I spent a lot of time in the woods watching how things grew. My brothers and I would dam a little creek and we’d watch what happened when the rains got too big and burst the dam.”
When he was 11, Shobe dug up a red cedar tree “that the birds have scattered across the countryside” and taught himself to prune. “Our ancestors probably brought the red cedars here because you always find them at home sites.
“My goal was to make sure that all of the cuttings were out of the tree so there weren’t brown cuttings left there a day or two later. And, I hid my cuts — like I still do today — as best I could by cutting on a slant, downward so you don’t see broken stems when they’re fresh.”
Shobe said he still has three main interests he has had since childhood: music, government and horticulture.
He graduated from Eastern with a degree in history and social science, although his father told him he should go into some type of greenhouse work.
While at Eastern, he found the magazine put out by the Royal Horticulture Society and read it each month.
He joined the society in 1979, after he got out of the service, and has been a member since. “I guess you could say I’m highly influenced by British gardening,” he said.
Before he moved to his current home 19 years ago, Shobe rented a country home surrounded by one acre of land.
“I added hillside and woods to the lawn and ended up with eight acres.”
When he moved to Charleston, he brought as many of his plants and trees as he could with him.
The reason his garden is crowded, he said, is because he wanted to have variety for classes at Eastern if they wanted to visit.
“Otherwise, if I had the acreage in the country, it would be spread out with rolling lawns,” he said. “There would be room for specimen trees to stand out by themselves.”
Among the flowers and trees in Shobe’s garden are pink and white magnolias, Sweet William, calla lilies, smoke trees, dame’s rocket, viburnum, coleus, lilacs, iris, daffodils, columbine, hyacinths, and a banana tree he mulches each year that has survived outside for three seasons.
There are dogwood trees, holly, azaleas, climbing hydrangea, rhododendron, hostas, a weeping copper beech tree, wisteria, and a couple of Scotch broom trees, to name only a few.
There is also a tall, thin tree called a curly lamppost maple with branches only inches long. The tree is a cultivar of a Norway maple, which looks similar to one on campus that can be seen from Lincoln Avenue.
The tree at Eastern is a sugar maple. A couple of crosses enabled it to shoot straight up, but only branch out a fraction of an inch each year.
“I love growing things and manipulating the growth of the trees,” Shobe said.
“I don’t always know the names of things, and I certainly don’t know the botanical names. I wish I did, but at this stage of my life, I don’t find it needful to worry about it.”
Shobe spends countless hours working in his garden, but he also enjoys just walking through it, “sometimes at night when the moonlight makes everything look different.
“I’ve gardened as long as I can remember and I can’t imagine not doing it as long as I’m able,” he said.
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Billie Brant wrote on May 25, 2008 6:47 AM: