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Plant expert Gil Whitton was 82

The gardening public knew him from newspaper columns and radio and TV shows. He also directed the county fair.

By CRAIG BASSE
Published March 3, 2005

Gil Whitton, one of the Suncoast's best-known experts on plants and gardens and former director of the Pinellas County fair, died this week.

Mr. Whitton, director of the Pinellas County Cooperative Extension Service for a quarter century died Tuesday (March 1, 2005) at Roberts Care Center at Hospice of the Lakes, Palatka. He had lung cancer, his family said.

He was 82. Mr. Whitton left the extension service post in 1982 but remained a high-profile member of the gardening community as a horticultural consultant and tour guide for gardens abroad.

The gardening public knew him through newsletter and weekly columns in the St. Petersburg Times and the St. Petersburg Evening Independent.

For more than a decade he also had a call-in talk show on radio, WFLA-AM 970, and television, WFLA-Ch. 8, and was the host of In Your Garden on public television.

A genial man, he nearly always sported a big grin and a chewed - but unsmoked - cigar.

The cigar "was his trade mark," said Nan Jensen, hired by Mr. Whitton some 30 years ago and now the assistant extension director. "He was a good man and one renowned in the area of horticulture."

Mr. Whitton freely shared his experiences with plants at his former home in Palm Harbor, 21/2 acres brightened every spring by hundreds of azaleas growing in woods of pine and oak.

He tried to keep his garden carefree.

"This is what you call a naturalistic garden, nothing formal here," he told a visitor in 1989. "Pine needles fall; I don't mulch."

Since 1996, Mr. Whitton lived in Hawthorne, southeast of Gainesville.

A self-styled farm boy, Gilbert Marshall Whitton Jr. was born in Albany, Mo., and grew up during the Depression. In 1939, he graduated from high school and won a scholarship to Central Business College in Kansas City.

His father gave him $10 - "It was all he could spare; in fact, it was more than he could spare," Mr. Whitton once recalled. He got a job paying $1.25 a week plus room, board and tips at a combination dining room-boarding house. After graduation, he worked for Quaker Oats and IBM as a secretary.

When World War II broke out, Mr. Whitton joined the Navy's V-5 program, ending up an electronics technician at air bases in Florida. He later worked as a civilian at the Jacksonville Naval Air Station and for the federal government in Atlanta.

After serving in the Navy during the Korean War, Mr. Whitton studied for a year at the University of Maryland and then enrolled at the University of Florida.

At UF he received a bachelor's degree in horticulture and master's degree in plant pathology. He came within three hours of completing a doctorate in nematology, he said in 1989, but he "couldn't pass German," an overlooked requisite.

Three years ago, however, he finally earned a doctorate, his family said, in philosophy.

He came to Pinellas County in 1957 and joined the Extension Service as an assistant director, beginning a 25-year career.

His gardening columns and broadcasts ultimately landed him in trouble. After about 17 years as extension director, he resigned in 1982 in the midst of an investigation by the county administrator's office that he accepted pay for outside work without approval.

Mr. Whitton said at the time that county officials knew he had outside activities, but they didn't know that he was being paid.

"I never told them," he said. "And certainly they were in violation of county policy. But I guess from the standpoint that I made all the (articles) available (to anyone who wanted to use them), I felt like it was not wrong."

He had been a president of the Pinellas County Chapter of the Florida Nurserymen and Growers Association, and a member of the National Garden Writers Association.

Survivors include his wife of 32 years, Dee; two daughters, Lynn Marsh, Clearwater, and Marsha Nagy-Whitton, Moscow, Idaho; two sons, Tom, Melrose, and Todd Chamberlain, Hawthorne; two sisters, Helen Elliott, Tulsa, Okla., and Jean England, Belton, Mo.; eight grandchildren; and a great-grandchild.

Moring Funeral Home, Melrose, is in charge. There will be a memorial service at 4 p.m. March 12 at Sylvan Abbey Funeral Home, 2853 Sunset Point Road, Clearwater.

- Information from Times files was used in this obituary.

[Last modified March 3, 2005, 17:35:03]