Don Hastings just can't understand it.

Gardening is a $38 billion industry. Yet as he sees it, fewer and fewer people are taking the time to actually buy into the experience of growing something.

(ENLARGE)
H.G. Hastings started his seed catalog in Florida in 1889, then moved it to Atlanta's Mitchell Street.
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Don Hastings and his wife, Betsy, have lived on their Roswell area farm for 37 years.
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"Nobody really gardens anymore. Plants are treated as objects, like a piece of furniture, instead of a living, beautiful thing that is constantly changing," says Hastings, a third-generation horticulturist whose name is synonymous with Southern gardening. "People are missing out on what life's all about because instead of nurturing a plant, they're able to return it to the nursery at the first problem and get their money back."

Hastings — retired nurseryman, plant researcher, radio host and author — knows of what he speaks. His grandfather founded H.G. Hastings seed company, an Atlanta-based institution for more than a century, that grew to include retail nurseries. Today, the seed company is gone, and the Hastings name brands only one garden center, in Brookhaven — the family sold the company 30 years ago — but its legacy continues with Don Hastings and his horticulturist son, Chris.

Tonight, that heritage will be honored when the Southeastern Flower Show presents Hastings, 75, with its highest honor, the Robert McGee Balentine Trophy, for his contributions to Southeastern horticulture. "Don and his family just symbolize anything to do with gardening in Atlanta," said Linda Copeland, the award committee chairwoman.

The award honors a folksy plant expert who never claimed to have all the answers, contending gardening, like parenting, is all in the way plants are nurtured.

"Gardening is not a study but an experience. Because of unpleasant childhood experiences with them, I have no desire to plant junipers, so I don't," he writes in "Rich Harvest" (Longstreet Press, $20). "But I love camellias. Guess what? They do fabulously for me."

For him, nurturing has always come naturally. Growing up, he wanted to become a doctor, but the pressure to stick with the family business doused such a notion. "From conception, there was no other choice," Hastings says, yet he never regretted his career path.

Though he says his quiet but whiskey-swilling, tobacco-spitting grandfather had little time for him, he worshipped H.G.'s passion. "He had one of the most brilliant approaches to Southern horticulture," he recalls from the Roswell area farm he and his wife, Betsy, have called home for 37 years. After surviving the agricultural and economic disasters resulting from cotton farming, H.G. Hastings "saw that the South just had to change."

From catalog to TV

Always ahead of his time, H.G. Hastings started his seed catalog in Florida in 1889, then a decade later moved it to Atlanta's Mitchell Street. He used the publication as a mouth organ, chiding farmers, for example, for depleting the land by planting too much cotton. Hastings made the catalog an odd size so it would stick out in a stack of magazines and with heavy slick paper so it was less likely to end up as outhouse toilet paper.

By the 1950s, when young Don joined his father, Don Sr., two brothers and grandfather in the business, the company operated several garden centers in metro Atlanta.

At its Cheshire Bridge Road store, Don Hastings became the answer man for head-scratching homeowners. In the '80s, his popularity landed him a 15-year stint on radio fielding gardening questions. "You felt like you were doing someone a favor by helping them," Hastings recalls. "The interaction was so much fun."

So were the studio antics, such as the day commentator Neal Boortz wrapped a bra over Hastings' headphones.

"Don's folksy radio delivery and practical advice taught listeners that all it took to have a good garden or a pretty landscape was a little bit of common sense," says Walter Reeves, host of WSB-AM's "Lawn & Garden Show." "Few others have the lifelong experience to truly know what they're talking about concerning Southern gardening."

In fact, Hastings' popularity far outlived the business, which by 1976 the family was forced to sell as a recession took its toll. The new owner, Wayne Carr, would later move the last remaining garden center to Brookhaven.

Yet the loss paled with the humility of a scandal 15 years later that stood to tarnish the family name. Carr was found guilty in 1994 of killing his wife and served nearly four years in prison until the Georgia Supreme Court threw out the conviction.

News accounts identified Carr as the owner of Hastings Nature & Garden Center, and some didn't know, or forgot, that the Hastings family no longer owned the company. Take the autograph seeker who cornered Hastings during one of his book tours to ask: "Did you really kill your wife?"

For once, he had no comeback.

Gardeners grow up

Hastings learned of the scandal while working in Malaysia, one of several foreign countries that brought an exciting new adventure after selling the company. Working with a former college roommate, he and a business partner developed major export-oriented fruit and vegetable farms in tropical and subtropical climates throughout the '80s. While the work took him away from his family, he has nothing but fond memories, including introducing Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to broccoli. Hastings recalls the leader asking, "You actually eat this stuff?"

His most rewarding experience occurred in the Philippines, where he developed trial gardens that introduced island residents to growing vegetables. "Their enthusiasm and excitement over growing something to eat was just overwhelming," Hastings says. Within a year, surrounding rice paddies were dotted with little farms — results that to this day tickle the man the Filipinos affectionately dubbed "Papa Don."

Back home in Sweet Apple, Hastings' own children were becoming young men. His younger son, Chris, went on to earn his master's in horticulture and is an arborist specializing in historic tree preservation.

"My parents never pushed us to enter the field because Dad never had that choice," says Chris, who considers Don his best teacher. "I rely on him so much for advice and probably talk to him daily about some horticultural issue. I often think about the fact that he had these same conversations with his own father, and Gramps, in turn, talked to H.G."

Ten years ago, he and his dad conspired to write a book about Southern gardening. But it wasn't until they launched the book tour that Chris learned his most valuable lessons. Being a plant nerd fresh out of college and a fourth-generation Hastings, he felt overwhelmed by the pressure to know all the answers to gardeners' questions. "I finally asked Dad, 'What if I don't know?' "

Don's reply was simply: Just admit it. "One of the greatest things I learned from him," Chris says, "is to enjoy being around other gardeners and seeing what they know."

Perhaps that's why his father maintains gardening is "not a study but an experience." He cites things like the new flower beds he and his sons built each year as Mother's Day gifts for his wife or watching a tree develop that they planted from seed.

"The real fun of gardening," Don Hastings says, "is the feeling of accomplishment when you plant something, it grows up, and your children and grandchildren climb it."

H.G., no doubt, would drink to that.

HASTINGS ON . . .

His grandfather, H.G. Hastings: "My dad always drove him everywhere. My sister and I would fight over who got to sit on the driver's side in the back seat because when [H.G.] would roll down the window on the passenger side to spit his tobacco, you'd sometimes catch it in the face."

Salvaging a seed company: As farming declined, Hastings shifted its business to plants but not before computerizing its mailing list. It flew Don Hastings to Texas for processing the data, and because he held the only copy — in one box — the company insured him for $1 million. "They'd been better off if the plane had crashed."

Highfalutin horticulture: When Hastings and his wife, Betsy, started their farm they didn't own a fertilizer distributor. Loy Thomas, an old vegetable expert at the garden center, had just the solution, Hastings says: "Put your finger under the drain hole of an 8-inch pot, then fill it with fertilizer. It makes a great fertilizer distributor."

DON HASTINGS FILE

Personal: Age 75, grandson of H.G. Hastings, founder of Hastings' Seeds catalog; son of Don Sr. and Louise, both horticulturists. Married to Betsy, father to Don and Chris. Two grandchildren.

Education: Horticulture degree, Cornell University.

Career: Worked at H.G. Hastings Co. for 26 years until business was sold. Developed major export-oriented fruit and vegetable farms in Asia and Europe. Was host of garden radio shows for WRNG, WCNN. Was co-host of syndicated TV series, "Gardening in the South," with Kathy Henderson. Horticulture consultant to Hampton Island Preservation.

Writing: Author of three-volume "Gardening in the South With Don Hastings" as well as "Rich Harvest: A Life in the Garden," "Trees for the South"; co-author with Chris Hastings of "Month-by-Month Gardening in the South." Monthly contributor, Memphis Commercial Appeal; monthly columnist, Cherokee Ledger-News.