The Urban Jungle
When locals come to Charlie Thigpen for gardening and planting advice, he usually finds himself saying, “How big is your pot?”
Based on their answer, he takes a moment to draw an appropriately sized circle in the dirt outside his shop, Charlie Thigpen’s Garden Gallery, to show them the correct size. After that, he gives them watering tips and suggests how much sunlight is appropriate.
“What’s awesome is when they later come back with their camera to show me what they’ve done or how good it looks, that’s when we’ve done a good job,” Thigpen said.
For Thigpen, his favorite part of work is the relationships with his customers and the fact that he is surrounded by beauty every single day.
Charlie Thigpen’s Garden Gallery, located at 2805 Second Ave. S. beside Pepper Place, combines the careful curating of an art gallery while selling plants and a large selection of garden design items. In the shop, they sell everything from lawn ornaments to plant boxes to everything in between.
Thigpen likes to keep the outside looking different every few months by switching up art installations. Currently, they have a locally-made bottle arch with a 35-foot squash plant growing over it, in addition to a moon vine. It’s a different way of looking at a garden, he said, plus, Oven Bird, the restaurant next door, gets to pick some of the squash to use in their dishes.
For the last eight years, Thigpen’s gallery has been his only job, with Thigpen primarily dealing with the plants, and his wife, Cindy, doing all the marketing and the day-to-day business.
He admits that the original opening of his own shop was hard.
“People always ask me if I own the garden shop. I laugh and tell them, ‘No, the garden shop owns me,’” he said.
Previously, he’d just spent the last 29 years — and his wife 20 years — working for Southern Living. He knew that the publishing world was changing, though, so he and Cindy started thinking of alternatives. A garden shop was the obvious answer.
“It soon became team Cindy and Charlie,” he said. “We decided that we’d work for ourselves.”
Growing up, Thigpen said he remembers his grandparents having big gardens that always had an influence on him.
“That generation, they had to know how to grow plants, you know, cause they lived off them, canning and things like that. I remember doing that and having great vegetable gardens,” Thigpen said. “I’ve always kind of been in with that.”
Plus, he said his family has a background in art, as well as two of his sisters now being great artists.
“That’s what we try to do at the shop is blend art and gardens, that’s why it’s called the garden gallery,” he said.
As with the nature of a garden shop, many of the items they get are seasonal. Throughout the year, they mainly sell annuals, perennials, herbs, vegetables, interior plants and the recently popular air plants. The work caring for them and watering in the summer is time-consuming, Thigpen said, because of the heat, but it’s important to them to groom the plants properly and keep them healthy and looking their best.
“We say we have a lot of children,” he always jokes to people.
The most popular day of the week is Saturday, where they get 300 to 400 people coming through the shop in a three-hour period. The Saturday morning Pepper Place farmers market brings in hundreds of newcomers each week, since the garden shop is only a few steps away.
On most every day of the week, he said, at least one person comes into the store inquiring about a gift for someone. Their signature gift items are wrapped in local burlap.
He and his wife both go out of their way to search in different markets for new and unique items for the shop. They sell art from local artists. A few examples include what has been dubbed “wine chimes” — wind chimes made of recycled wine bottles — handcrafted leather purses and frames filled with pressed botanical foliage and flowers.
“If you garden and you like plants, most people like our shop,” he said. “It’s very different, what we offer.” Ninety-five percent of the plants, he said, they get from local wholesale growers.
They also offer monthly hypertufu classes, where a little over a dozen people come out and pay for a special class of making three planters apiece. Hypertufu is a type of porous rock that is popular for making planters or pots. Thigpen said he and his wife keep trying to stop offering the classes, but their hypertufu nights are so popular that people continue requesting them each month. Over the years, he said that they’ve probably taught more than 800 people hypertufu.
The Charlie Thigpen Garden Gallery is open Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., and on Saturday from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. For more information about the garden gallery, go to charlie-thigpen.squarespace.com.