George Shakespear: A force for gardening arrives via Wall Street
Shakespeare ”“ William, the Bard ”“ said everyone has a story.
Shakespear ”“ George, no final “e” ”“ thinks that”™s probably true.
“Although it”™s hard to know your own story when you”™re living it,” he says. “Everyone has more than one story. We”™re all pretty complex.”
Shakespear”™s own serpentine tale begins in Buenos Aires, where he was born to an auto engineer, and winds through Detroit, where he was educated by Jesuits, and New Haven, where he studied art and design at Yale University before eventually landing on Wall Street.
It was there that he worked in corporate communications for J.P. Morgan for 18 years until the end of 2002 when merger-induced company downsizing gave him the impetus to turn his avocation into a vocation.
“I thought it was a good opportunity to take my corporate communications skills and apply them to my love of nature and plants,” says Shakespear, who lives in Croton-on-Hudson. “What I love is the plant world”™s connection to life and other things around us.”
He is sitting at a picnic table behind the 19th-century black-and-white clapboard house that is the headquarters for The Garden Conservancy in Cold Spring, where he serves as communications manager. In the background, Clove Creek burbles past a felled tree and the brown underbrush. Still, it a perfect day early in the spring ”“ the sun warm, the air soft, the breeze light ”“ and Shakespear, an avid gardener, is reveling in the earth”™s reawakening.
There is an air of the gentleman and the scholar about the modest, bespectacled Shakespear as well as a bit of the Bard in his balding pate and beard.
(Since people always ask, Shakepear explains that a great-uncle has traced the family”™s history back to John Shakespear ”“ one generation and one town removed from Will. The author Shakespeare, who spelled his name a dozen different ways, had no direct descendants beyond a granddaughter.)
What Shakespeare and Shakespear have in common is a curiosity about life and a love of the written and spoken word. These are qualities that Shakespear puts to extensive use in his job with The Garden Conservancy, a national organization.
“Our mission is to help preserve America”™s exceptional gardens for the education and enjoyment of the public,” he says. “We work primarily with people who”™ve created exceptional gardens to turn them into public ones.”
Although, he adds, The Garden Conservancy has also assisted such public gardens as the hardy, windswept ones you”™ll find on Alcatraz Island, once the site of the infamous prison.
In its 20-year history, the conservancy has spent almost $9 million on more than 90 prominent gardens across the country. They range from The Ruth Bancroft Garden in Walnut Creek, Calif., which Shakespear says has a strong collection of cacti and dry garden plants; to the Pearl Fryars Topiary Garden in Bishopville, S.C., designed by the self-taught Fryars, a regular Edward Scissorhands; to the Hollister House Garden in Washington, Conn., where an 18th-century New England farmstead meets a 20th-century English country garden.
The conservancy”™s local preservation project is Rocky Hills in Mount Kisco, whose 14 acres of woodlands, stony outcroppings and vibrant azaleas were cultivated by William and Henriette Suhr. Mrs. Suhr, 93, has bequeathed Rocky Hills to the Westchester County Department of Parks, Recreation and Conservation. But you can preview the site May 8 and 29 as part of the conservancy”™s season-long Open Days Program when the public gets a chance to stroll through premier private gardens. (For a list of Open Days in Westchester, Dutchess, Columbia and Ulster counties, go to opendaysprogram.org.)
For The Garden Conservancy, Shakespear deals with the press, edits the quarterly newsletter, manages the website (gardenconservancy.org) and works with his counterparts at the conservancy”™s partners. It”™s more than a 9-to-5 job. But he”™s not complaining.
“I love it,” he says.
The former director of science public relations at The New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx, Shakespear sees a connection between communications and gardening:
“There is a strong aesthetic sense in the appreciation of nature and landscape design. Communications, too, is creative”¦.”
But what plant life really has in common with the written word is that it”™s an “avenue to many other things,” Shakespear says, including business, medicine and art and design.
And while writing about gardening generally leaves less time for the gardening itself, Shakespear and his wife remain enthusiasts, nurturing perennials and vegetables alike in the English style.
Like Voltaire”™s Candide ”“ who also came a long way to end up right where he belonged ”“ Shakespear believes in cultivating his garden.