Bishopville & the Pearl Fryar Topiary Garden Guide

In the early 1980s, in the small Pee Dee town of Bishopville, a factory worker named Pearl Fryar — blocked from buying a home in a white neighborhood because neighbors assumed a Black man wouldn’t keep it up — set out to win the town’s Yard of the Month with plants nobody else wanted. Self-taught, working with shrubs rescued from nursery compost piles, he sculpted a three-acre wonderland of more than 400 living topiaries into swirling, abstract, gravity-defying shapes no gardening book would recognize. He won that Yard of the Month in 1985, and then he kept going for forty years. Fryar passed in April 2026; the nonprofit garden he built lives on, open and free.