Jenrette called in December and said the job had to be finished by February 20. “I told him, ‘Dick, you’re delusional. I can’t possibly get that done.’ He said, ‘Well, the city of Charleston has asked if Prince Charles of England and King Constantine of Greece can stay at my house. You’ve got to help me out.’”

Callaway loaded up his dog and moved to Charleston. For two months, he and his crew worked feverishly to meet the deadline. Because Hugo had destroyed nurseries as far inland as Charlotte, North Carolina, they were driving to Georgia and Alabama for plants. “We were buying camellias out of people’s front yards,” he says. They hired a crane to lower a smaller crane into the yard and used that crane to lift mature magnolias into the back. Though it nearly killed him, Callaway readied the garden for the royal visit—even finished early since Scotland Yard had to sweep the yard for bombs.

“The Prince of Wales ate breakfast out there every morning,” Callaway says with a satisfied sigh. “You know what he told Dick?” Here Callaway pauses and puts on a refined British accent: “‘Isn’t it wonderful that you didn’t lose the lovely garden.’”

Callaway’s career took off. “You have no idea what a benediction it is to have somebody who can afford anybody in the world pick me,” he says. “I had patina all of a sudden.”

Rooted in History
In the world of historic preservation, buildings have long overshadowed landscapes. The National Register of Historic Places was established in 1966, but it wasn’t until 1989 that the U.S. government published technical guidance on how to nominate “historic designed landscapes” such as gardens. Out of the more than eighty-three thousand individual listings on the Register, fewer than two thousand are landscapes. Far less is known about early American gardens and garden designers than about old buildings and architects. Early garden plans are rare, as Callaway well knows. Mostly, though, people just don’t get it. Gardens grow and propagate and die. How could they be pegged to a point in history? For Chip Callaway, who has always associated gardening with the past, preservation comes naturally. This has everything to do with his being a Southerner.

For one thing, Callaway understands the inextricable link between the land and culture in the South and how that link is being weakened by modern life. He frowns at the mention of sprawl, the development model that chews up horticulturally rich rural land and spits out subdivisions and commercial strips dotted with a few token species of ornamentals. In 2000, Callaway became a partner with longtime business associate Mark Peters in Piedmont Carolina Nursery, a Colfax, North Carolina, company. “We don’t grow junk plants—juniper, nandina, crimson pygmy barberry—the stuff you see in the McDonald’s parking lot,” Callaway says. Rather he supplies tried-and-true favorites as well as unique and hard-to-find species—many of them heirloom plants—to his own clients and to the public at large. It’s one way Callaway keeps the past alive.

During my visit, we drive through the forty-seven-acre nursery, where rows and rows of woody ornamentals in black plastic buckets stand beneath long stretches of arched irrigation pipe. It’s built on a gradual slope with a pond at the lower end; water drains into the reservoir, where it is pumped back to irrigate the plants. From the driver’s seat, Callaway points to a tall, thin boxwood variety given to him by a client who owns an early-nineteenth-century home called Wharton Place on the Eastern Shore of Virginia. “We passed it by a Ph.D. at NC State,” he says, and yet the species is still a mystery, the kind of mystery that quickens Callaway’s pulse. And now, like a modern-day Johnny Appleseed who propagates boxwood sprigs, Callaway hopes to distribute cuttings of this possibly unique historic variety throughout the Southeast rather than allow it to disappear.

In addition to preserving old-fashioned plant varieties, Callaway also cares deeply about historical appropriateness. He is occasionally hired to design something contemporary, like the grounds of Greensboro’s Proximity Hotel, a hip LEED Platinum hotel, where he and I have lunch on a patio shaded by a modernistic grid of trident maples. But since the majority of his clients live in traditional homes—most of them dating back a century or two—he tends to favor traditional gardens. “A contemporary landscape with a Georgian house would be absurd-looking,” he says.

On a driving tour through some of the upscale neighborhoods of Winston-Salem and Greensboro, Callaway points out garden after garden he has designed, sometimes three or four side by side, as if the owners were literally keeping up with the Joneses. Every garden is meticulously groomed. And what if someone doesn’t keep the beds weeded or shrubs pruned? “I call them up!” he says. This is his bread and butter. The big preservation projects, like the one at Wharton Place, are the meat of his practice.

Later we get out and stroll the extensive gardens of an early-twentieth-century home, Callaway’s favorite garden period. He shows me the front patio, croquet court, and pergola he designed, as well as a stunning glass conservatory that was moved from another historic Winston home. The clients’ daughter lives next door with her family. Since the grandchildren often skip back and forth between the two homes, Callaway designed a slate garden path in the shape of a hopscotch court.

Callaway stops and points to a lavender lily. “This is an old-fashioned plant people call naked ladies,” he says, which sparks a discussion of plant varieties and the pros and cons of hybridization. Callaway’s all for some of the new drought-resistant shrubs and trees being propagated, but in general he feels that hybridization has stolen some of the charm from plants. “You get roses these days that look and smell like cabbages.” There’s nothing like a fragrant antique rose. And that takes us back to the topic of heritage plants. He simply cherishes an old-fashioned plant with a personal connection.

Callaway looks up from the lily with a thoughtful expression on his face. “I’m of the age now when people are starting to tell stories about plants they got from me,” he says. “I take that as a high compliment.” But it’s not the praise that drives him. “It’s just fun to do,” he says. “And God knows my plants need thinning.”