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Garden: Cultivating beauty

Pete Sabine is sort of the Johnny Appleseed of St. Petersburg, propagating cuttings from his tropical oasis and giving thousands of plants away.

By YVONNE SWANSON
Published May 20, 2006

[Photos: Yvonne Swanson]

Angel’s trumpets are among the flowers “Island Pete” Sabine grows in his garden in the Historic Kenwood neighborhood of St. Petersburg.

	Johnny Appleseed grew apples, but Sabine, who claims to be a descendant, grows pineapples.
	Sabine’s home is surrounded by the tropical fruits and flowers he loves to grow and give away.

If you believe the legend of Johnny Appleseed, you think this folk hero walked around the country with a sack of seeds on his back, tossing them here and there until apple trees covered all the land.

The real Johnny Appleseed was John Chapman, an eccentric New Englander who loved nature, religion, Indians and walking barefoot no matter the weather. He's credited with planting more than 100,000 square miles of apple orchards in western Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana, not with apple seeds, but by grafting trees and nurturing them in orchard nurseries. The trees were sold to early settlers traveling west, helping to spread apple trees across the country. This made Chapman a rich man by the time he died at age 70 in 1845.

Fast-forward to 2006 and an eccentric, barefoot retiree whose St. Petersburg garden is so prolific that he has given away thousands (he has lost count) of plants to gardeners throughout the area. What's more, he swears he's a descendant of Chapman on his mother's side, with documents from the genealogy research service at the Wilton (Conn.) Library to prove it.

His name is Pete Sabine, but people know him as "Island Pete." Retired from the Coast Guard, he spends most of his time in his tropical garden at home in the Historic Kenwood neighborhood. "I consider gardening what I do," says the 52-year-old Connecticut native. "I go out every day, pull weeds and replace plants." He also propagates cuttings from his most prized plants, just as Johnny Appleseed did 150-plus years ago.

When he's not tending the abundance of fruit trees, angel's trumpets, hibiscus, gingers, bromeliads, pineapples and other tropical plants packed into his 130- by 50-foot lot, you might find him barefoot and in his trademark tropical shirt at a plant sale, garden show or local nursery. If you count yourself among his friends, you might unexpectedly find plants on your doorstep from time to time.

Sometimes he'll approach strangers at the garden center and offer free plants. "People think I'm crazy, but I'm being very serious. I want to give them plants," he says. "Some people can't afford to buy plants, so I give them away."

Maybe there really is something to the Johnny Appleseed connection. "I think it's the reason I give away stuff," says Sabine. "It will make their yard look nice, and then their neighbor's yard look nice. They can share plants with another neighbor. It all works out in the end."

Like the young couple with the new house and no money to fix up the yard. Their real estate agent called Sabine, who gave them five carloads of plants worth hundreds of dollars from his garden. Sabine hopes that once their plants begin to multiply, they'll give cuttings to friends and neighbors, passing on the seed and helping to beautify the community.

It's common knowledge that gardeners enjoy sharing cuttings of their plants. That's one of the reasons to join a garden club or plant society, says Sabine. But he has taken it a step further, cultivating a network of like-minded gardening enthusiasts who share and distribute all types of plants and pots throughout the community.

At today's Historic Kenwood Plant Sale, more than 100 plants were donated by Sabine, including 70 angel's trumpets (Brugmansia) in shades of orange, yellow, pink and white. He has been cultivating the popular evergreen trees with the striking trumpet-shaped blossoms for months. By Sabine's way of thinking, those 70 angel's trumpets will be planted in 70 gardens, then grafted or propagated by seed and shared with at least 70 other gardens, and so on.

"There is a madness to this. The madness is that plants grow and populate and spread and there are a zillion of them," says Sabine. "Everything that has been in my yard has eventually been turned over to someone else. I've given to everybody."

Yvonne Swanson is a freelance writer in St. Petersburg and a master gardener for Pinellas County.

[Last modified May 19, 2006, 09:12:34]