With deep admiration and affection, the Garden Conservancy remembers the late Pearl Fryar, a self-taught artist and horticulturist whose South Carolina topiary garden grew into a beautifully inspiring, welcoming, and dazzling landscape of living sculpture. Fryar passed away April 4, 2026, at the age of 86.
The Pearl Fryar Topiary Garden in Bishopville, SC, reflects the artist’s creativity, discipline, and personal vision, which challenged racial prejudice and attracted international attention. The Garden Conservancy was proud to support Fryar and the garden between 2006 and 2021 with preservation planning, fundraising, public promotion, organizational development, grants, and other assistance. In 2009, Garden Conservancy board members gave Fryar a cherry picker, allowing him to accomplish much more work in much less time.
Born in North Carolina to a sharecropper family, a graduate of North Carolina Central University, Fryar made his first foray into topiary in the 1980s, when he and his wife looked for a new home. Prospective white neighbors turned them away, suggesting an African American couple would not maintain their property. In response, Fryar set his sights on being the first Black recipient of the local garden club’s Yard of the Month award in Bishopville. Horticulture soon became a passion. Using his own labor, resources, and time after work, Fryar transformed his three-acre property into a topiary garden with hundreds of trees and shrubs, and developed a range of styles. He trimmed evergreen plants around his yard into fluid, abstract shapes, and rescued discarded plants—junipers, hollies, Leyland cypresses, and oaks—from local nurseries.
By the early 90s, the media began featuring his plant carvings of “Love, Peace and Goodwill” along with the artist and his work. In 2006, he inspired the award-winning documentary film A Man Named Pearl.
Visits to the garden grew dramatically with new visibility, and Fryar gave lectures around the country, sharing his inspirational message encouraging people to follow their own passions and develop their own talents. Committed to sharing and reinforcing his personal learning journey, he founded a scholarship fund for local high school students.
Fryar’s garden, where love is the central theme, has become a community focal point and a destination for tourists. Neighbors created their own topiary garden, and topiary caught on throughout the town.
Energetic and imaginative, he delighted in sharing his work for people to enjoy in their own ways. “I like to let people see what they want in my plants,” he once commented. “The creativity comes in making a shape that speaks to me in one way but may say something else to another.”
Photo by Dustin Shores
