Kirkland Moore was given a trowel at the age of five, in Folkston, Georgia, and he has been in the garden ever since. He still uses that trowel.
He came by it honestly. His mother, Grace Underwood Moore, led garden clubs, directed flower shows, and taught her children that a garden is both a larder and an inheritance: food for the table, seed saved from one year to the next, and standards worth keeping. Kirkland has spent fifty years keeping them.
That keeping became a vocation in historic gardens. His research and design work have served Colonial Williamsburg, the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation at Monticello, the Historic Savannah Foundation, and the Garden Club of Virginia, along with private gardens across the United States. When the University of Georgia Press returned Robert Squibb's Gardener's Calendar for South-Carolina, Georgia, and North-Carolina to print, the first Southern planting guide of its kind, first published in Charleston in 1787, Kirkland wrote the foreword. He has a historian's respect for what the old gardeners knew, and a plantsman's impatience to get it planted.
Television carried the garden further. For years he hosted American Gardener on QVC, bringing plants, tools, and garden ornaments into living rooms across the country, and he served as a garden and lifestyle correspondent for ABC's Good Morning America. He calls himself, with a Southerner's shrug, "sort of the Forrest Gump of gardening": he traveled everywhere, and the accent went with him.
Highlands became home in 2006, when he came from rural Georgia to work with the Old Edwards Inn and opened a small shop beside the inn's own store, Acorns. He named his Oakleaf. In the years since, Oakleaf grew from a garden shop into a way of working: designing gardens for weddings, private parties, and retreats, and composing the flowers for occasions that deserved them. He speaks of wedding work as helping to "launch families," and keeps the baby pictures his couples send him afterward, hundreds by now.
The shop chapter has closed, and the work has widened. Today Kirkland designs gardens and landscapes, arranges wedding florals, speaks to garden clubs and communities across the South and beyond, and takes his curated collection of rare plants, garden antiques, and requisites on the road to pop-up shops at shows and festivals. Some things travel with him everywhere: Miss Lena's black hollyhocks, grown from seed an elderly Georgia gardener pressed into his hand decades ago and saved, line upon line, ever since; and the trowel, worn smooth, still first out of the basket.
Kirkland lives and gardens in Highlands, North Carolina.
"If I'm going to breathe the air here, I'm going to give back."
