GARDENING : Professionals Find Earthy Way to Weed Out Tensions of Work

Anxious executives and pressured professionals are taking to gardening like earthworms to compost.

Maybe that’s because nurturing plants is totally absorbing, mentally and physically, as any gardener will corroborate. Or because gardening is self-paced, non-competitive, and even contemplative in nature. And these qualities make gardening a near-perfect outlet for releasing the tensions of the workweek.

Still, there are any number of diversions nearly as calming to jangled nerves. The reasons people in high-powered places choose gardening as the way to unwind are as individual as the executives.

Take Bob Berman of Laguna Hills, an executive for Xerox, for example. A high-energy guy, Berman could no more lounge around the pool--though he has one--than he could fall asleep on an airplane. His idea of relaxing after a rough week negotiating agreements with subcontractors is to come home, pull on a pair of leather gauntlets and wrestle with a 50-pound cactus.

Planting is always hard work, he says, but planting cactus is especially so. (An East Coast transplant, Berman fell in love with cacti on his first visit to Arizona.)

“Cactus are filled with water, so they’re very heavy,” he says. “But I like the manual aspect of gardening. I need to do something physical to take the edge off.

“When I’m finished I’m so tired sometimes I can hardly move. But it’s a good kind of tired. I like it. And I like the results.”

Most people find negotiating inherently stressful, says Berman, but he likes working out mutually agreeable arrangements between his company and subcontractors. “I like the pressure,” he says. What he doesn’t like is flying, and he’s always flying.

“I envy those people who drop off before takeoff,” he says, with a sigh. “I can’t sleep on planes.”

So Berman relieves the stress of long flights by pulling out a note pad and sketching designs for future garden projects, reading a gardening book for research purposes or daydreaming about his next bout with a cactus.

Joan Alvarez of Dana Point, editor in chief of Outdoor Retailer, like Berman, enjoys the physical side of gardening.

“I come out at 6 a.m. to water,” she says, “and before I know it I’ve got out the tree-trimmers, and I’ve forgotten everything else. The next thing I know, the sun is going down, and I’m running around trying to clean everything up in the last bit of light.

“Then I wonder why my hands are so cramped the next day that I can’t grip a pen.”

Unlike Berman, who grew up in New York City and never planted a thing in his life until seven years ago, Alvarez has been gardening since she was a child. While her girlfriends were earning their spending money by baby-sitting, she was weeding neighbors’ flower beds. One of her first jobs in Orange County, when she moved her from the East Coast, was trimming trees for the city of Newport Beach--the first female crew member in its history.

Alvarez relishes the solitary nature of gardening almost as much as the physical exercise. After a long day of nonstop talking with staff, photographers, illustrators, printers and advertisers, she craves the comparative silence of her garden.

And that’s a little ironic, she says, because she gave up an apprenticeship as a studio artist because that life was too lonely for her gregarious nature. “But, after dealing with people all day long,” she says, “I like being out there by myself.”

Don Miller of Corona del Mar, an academic surgeon at UCI Medical Center in Orange, doesn’t garden to escape his work, which he loves, though teaching interns how to operate, he confesses, is very stressful. “It’s like teaching someone how to drive,” he says. “It would be easier to do it yourself.”

A vegetable gardener, Miller plants to harvest.

“It’s been said the only difference between royalty and peasants was that royalty had fresh vegetables,” he says. “Well, I can pick something and cook it up a half-hour later. You can’t get fresher than that.”

Even two months ago, when by Miller’s standards his community garden plot was nearly through for the season, it yielded a royal bounty of cabbage, turnips, beets, chard, a last head of lettuce, a few tomatoes--and tons of fennel. “Take some, please,” said his wife, Jerry.

Almost as good as eating his crops is watching them grow, Miller says. And some of the things he plants--like soaring sunflowers and Stowel’s evergreen corn, both from his home state, Kansas--you almost literally can watch grow. When his garden is at its most vigorous, Miller drops by at least once a day to check on the plants’ progress.

“I didn’t live on a farm, but my grandparents did, and I grew up with farm people,” Miller says. “I’m used to plants that grow and change. There’s something basic about it. Just a few minutes a day watching things grow refreshes my spirit.”

Merle Robboy of Corona del Mar, an obstetrician, also grows a few vegetables. Not to mention herbs, fruit, macadamia nuts, Christmas cactus, flowering tropical shrubs and tons of dahlias.

But his license plate reads “Dr. Orchid” for good reason. Robboy is passionate about these exotic flowers. His collection includes orchids from Guatemala, Costa Rica, Brazil, Tahiti, the Philippines, India, China, Africa--2,000 in all, in every color but black.

Despite what the cartoonist who drew Brenda Starr imagined, orchids don’t come in that color, says Robboy. “The only black orchid is a dead one.”

Besides their beautiful flowers, the appeal of orchids lies in their challenge, Robboy says.

“They are very highly evolved plants,” he says. “Whether it’s warmth and moisture or cool evening, you have to re-create their natural conditions as closely as possible if you want them to bloom. It’s partially skill and partially luck, but when you succeed, it’s a real reward.”

Robboy’s favorite orchids are the warm-growing ones he nurtures in his greenhouses. “It’s like my own little green jungle back here,” he says. “I don’t hear traffic, airplanes, or the telephone (except for his ever-present beeper). Just flowers, mist and fragrance. It’s like being where these plants grow naturally.”

Gardening is the perfect hobby for obstetricians, whose hours are not their own, adds Robboy. A plant can always wait another day to be repotted, he says, but a baby arrives on its own schedule.

David Hemmings, president and founder of MegaTool, a manufacturer of cutting tools for printed circuit boards, has a green retreat, like Robboy’s, he can slip away to his entire back yard.

A windbreak of eucalyptus trees rides the ridge at the top of the Hemmings property in Orange. Canary Island pines and pepper trees fill the next tier, further blocking out sound and enhancing the property’s pleasant feeling of isolation. A large swimming pool is tucked into the right-hand side of the hill, and, at the base of it, on the left, just off the deck of the house, is a rock-girded koi pond with a waterfall cascading into it and a Japanese black pine bending over it.

In between are “islands” of easy-care shrubbery and intriguing paths that curve out of sight and don’t lose their charm even after the discovery that they only lead to a pool heater or a tool shed.

Despite the California pool, the mood is Japanese.

That’s because Hemmings fell in love with gardening all over again on his business trips to Japan.

“I’m English and from a family of gardeners, but I didn’t realize how unnatural European gardens were--all flowers and very geometrical--until I visited Japan,” he says. “Now I think their gardens are the most beautiful in the world.”

Though Hemmings does virtually all his own gardening, he deliberately created a setting that would require very low maintenance since he puts in long hours at MegaTool and does a lot of flying--he acquires frequent flyer miles on business travel at a rate (100,000 miles a year) even Berman would shudder to contemplate.

“When I’m home, though,” says Hemmings, “I live out here. There’s nothing more relaxing than contemplating a Japanese garden.”