Guy Wolff: Master Potter in the Garden

Foreword

Foreword I can’t remember how I first met Guy. Maybe we were both attending the same plant sale. Perhaps Tina Dodge introduced us, I have no recollection. But I’ll never forget the result of however we heard about each other. Vividly, I recall the day Guy backed his dusty pickup up to Logee’s Greenhouses (where I was working at the time) with a load of freshly thrown terracotta. Before that juncture ,I had seen and dragged home plenty of nineteenth-century flowerpots from Britain. But this was my first encounter with the contemporary version being delivered to the door by the real live potter. It was a transformational moment. From then on, I could showcase plants in the manner they deserved. That’s my first memory of Guy—complete with red bandana, worn dungarees , and hysterical laugh. It’s a wild laugh, a contagious laugh, a laugh like I’ve never heard before—the only possible analogy would be in the film Amadeus, but the film version in no way captures Guy’s declaration of sheer glee. He was definitely not just another vendor; we became immediate friends. I was infinitely excited about the pots, to be sure. But I was also transfixed by his honesty and grounded simplicity.For example,Guy’s signature packing material is straw—and I thought that was a brilliant, ecologically creative solution to the transportation problem. Turned out, the straw was quintessentially Guy. Practical,resourceful,simple,every inchYankee but with flair and showmanship, Guy put a spin on pottery like nobody before or since. My brother-in-law said that we’d never sell those pots, and he was right. Within a very short amount of time, I’d found an excuse to transplant everything from pelargoniums to clerodendrums into GuyWolff pots until my entire inventory of hand-thrown terracotta had walked away from the sales area and was making our stock plants infinitely happy. Who could bear to part with those plants? Prouder and stronger due to their underpinnings, compared to their compatriots all around, those plants were keepers. Of course, I wasn’t the only one to discover Guy Wolff, as the pages of this book attest. So I don’t think that I exaggerate when I say that Guy’s impact on thehorticulturalscenewasseismic.Togiveyouafeelingfortheatmosphereatthe time,it was an era in which plant purveyors were flocking to embrace plastic,and clay was moving rapidly into obscurity.That migration could have spelled doom. Staubach_GW_Finalpgs.indd 11 4/26/13 10:55 AM xii Guy Wolff Giventheleprechaun-greenpackagingthatepitomizedplasticflowerpots,potted plants lacked any sort of come-hither quality whatsoever to lure people to invite nature into their lives.The resulting product looked shabby.If GuyWolff hadn’t come along, we might have waved farewell to ornamental potted plants entirely. This book does a very thorough job of covering the specifics of how Guy learned his craft.But what it doesn’t talk about is how we found our way to Guy Wolff. After all, we’re talking about flowerpots here—not your typical crowd pleasers that put artists in the public eye. Guy might have been the greatest potter known to mankind,but he would still be working in obscurity if it weren’t for his passion. His enthusiasm sold his product. Make no mistake about it, we found Guy because of the fire in his belly. Guy Wolff makes a gorgeous flowerpot, it’s true. But it is his overflowing, larger-than-life enthusiasm for his craft that really brought him into the limelight. It’s all distilled into that laugh. Then again,Guy could be the most flamboyant fellow in the universe,and he would be whistling in the dark if his product wasn’t true. Beyond the fact that plants look like a million contained in Guy’s creations, they are also happier. Argue with me if you will,but I cannot be convinced otherwise.Plastic is just not what root systems want.Roots revel in clay.Not only do they love the medium, but they delight in a custom fit—although he’s not a gardener, heaven knows, Guy was sensitive enough to those who play in the dirt to ask for feedback and respond.When rosemary roots are given a pot where they can plummet straight down, and begonias are anchored in a container where their roots can stretch out, they thrive. They achieve their destiny. After Guy blazed the path, plenty of potteries realized that there...