Allen Lacy, a Professor Turned Gardening Columnist, Dies at 80. Written By Sam Roberts. Reprinted courtesy of the New York Times.

Allen Lacy, an accidental gardening columnist whose cramped backyard inspired practical advice on down-to-earth subjects like expunging crab grass and erudite cerebrations about far-flung fields like global warming, died on Sunday, January 27, 2015 at his home in Linwood, N.J. He was 80. The cause was complications of heart and kidney disease, his son Michael said.

Mr. Lacy, a philosophy professor who sowed his cultivated wit and wisdom for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and wrote or edited 10 books on gardening, began his love affair with horticulture in 1943 when he bit his third-grade teacher, a Mrs. Leghorn, on the ankle and was expelled from elementary school.

“I was in what amounted to a parole, supervised by a wonderful fourth-grade teacher, Ruth Harkey, who ran a small nursery and was a breeder of bearded iris,” he recalled in 2013 in an email exchange with the blog gardeninacity.“Mrs. Harkey taught me the elements of hybridization,” he continued, “and I was hooked at the idea of interfering with nature to bring something new into being.”

He worked for her after school and on Saturdays; spent 25 cents, his entire weekly allowance, to buy his first plant (a hybrid yellow iris called Happy Days, introduced in 1934); and later, after his family moved from a farm back to Dallas, was hired at a seed store where he was required to memorize its catalog.

While he managed to get his doctoral dissertation on Miguel de Unamuno, the Spanish writer, accepted by a publisher in the Netherlands, he was less successful as a novelist. His wife suggested that he write an essay about gardening. It was accepted by Horticulture magazine and captivated a Wall Street Journal editor, who hired him as a columnist.

For Mr. Lacy, a gardening column was about more than dishing the dirt (an inelegant word he always preferred to soil).
“Gardening is not a hobby, and only nongardeners would describe it as such,” he asserted in “The Inviting Garden: Gardening for the Senses, Mind and Spirit” (1998). “There is nothing wrong with having hobbies, but most hobbies are intellectually limited and make no reference to the larger world. By contrast, being wholeheartedly involved with gardens is involvement with life itself in the deepest sense.”The author Michael Pollan described Mr. Lacy as a role model who “showed me that you could bring real ideas into what had been a fairly light genre without losing the amateur vibe of garden writing.”

David Allen Lacy III was born on Jan. 7, 1935, in Dallas. His father, also named David, was a stockbroker. His mother was the former Jetta Surles. He graduated from Duke University with a bachelor’s degree in English in 1956, attended Vanderbilt University Divinity School and earned a doctorate in religion from Duke. He taught at several colleges before becoming a philosophy professor at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey in Pomona (now Stockton University).

In his columns for The Journal (from 1979 to 1985) and The Times (from 1986 to 1993), Mr. Lacy rhapsodized about the unfamiliar flora offered by the mail-order Montrose Nursery; the insect-repelling powers of Avon Skin So Soft bath oil; and his transformation, with local volunteers, of a one-acre plot in Linwood formerly occupied by an electrical substation into “the smallest arboretum in the world.” “Gardening is one of the very few human pursuits in which moral questions almost never arise,” he wrote in 1989. “The only two I can think of are stealing a plant or collecting one from the wild — and it is only in recent years that taking a wild plant has been widely accepted as wrong.”For all the profound issues reflected in his columns — from the extinction of certain species to the symbolism of the American front lawn— Mr. Lacy suggested that his gardening had not influenced his teaching.

“Philosophy had great, often unanswerable, questions,” he said. “In horticulture, the basic questions had answers. (Which end of the bulb points down?)”

He is survived by his wife of 57 years, Hella Lacy; a brother John Lacy; two sons, Paul (Debbie) and Michael (Christine); and grandchildren Samantha, Sean, Jennifer, Anna and Sarah.

Visitors will be received from 4:00 - 5:00pm, with a memorial service at 5:00pm, on Thursday, January 7, 2016 at Adams Perfect Funeral Home, 1650 New Rd, Northfield, NJ 08225.

In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to the Linwood Arboretum, c/o Adams-Perfect Funeral Home.

Arrangements are entrusted to and written condolences may be sent to: adams-Perfect.com.

Photo credit: Rob Cardillo for the New York Times.