A Texas Gardener Looks to Mexico for Inspiration JOHN GASTON FAIREY fell in love with a ramshackle farm and seven acres of overgrown pasture and scrubby woods here more than 40 years ago, because of a creek that rambled among oak and cypress trees. It reminded him of his childhood home in the rolling hills of central South Carolina. "I used to love to play in the creek," said Mr. Fairey, 81. So he recreated that lush landscape, filled with azaleas, camellias and magnolias, naming it Peckerwood after the plantation where Auntie Mame visits her Texas beau in the 1950s novel and the film with Rosalind Russell. The plants failed to "Live! Live! Live!" as Auntie Mame was always exhorting everyone to do. Most of them died in the Texas heat and drought. But as Mr. Fairey tells his students at Texas A&M University, "People who don't do anything don't make mistakes, and they don't get criticized." And to him, "Criticism is an honor." Hundreds of Mr. Fairey's mistakes - the metal tags of the plants that have died here - are piled like shiny installations throughout the garden, which over the years has grown to 39 acres, with a renowned collection of some 3,000 plants, most grown from seeds of drought and heat-tolerant natives of Texas and Mexico. Trained as a painter (first at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and then at the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied with Barnett Newman, Robert Motherwell and David Smith), Mr. Fairey moved south in 1964 to teach at Texas A&M in nearby College Station, settling down by this creek in 1971. "I made the mistake of bringing in a lot of live oaks, which do well here, but they need an acre of space," he said. While a few Southern magnolias have survived with their roots in the stream, and an azalea or two can be found along a shady path, in 1983 a tornado took out the tops of many trees, including a live oak near the house whose wide branches had protected other shade-lovers from the sun. "We had to move them so they wouldn't burn up, and started putting in palms and yuccas and agaves," Mr. Fairey said. Groves of magnolias, oaks, sycamores and maples also flourish here, but not the kind found in most American gardens. These are natives of the mountains in northern Mexico, where Mr. Fairey and fellow plant hunters have collected seeds and cuttings on some 90 expeditions over the last 24 years. Drug wars, not his age, have curtailed visits in recent years. "I never liked palms until I saw them growing under big oaks in Mexico," he said, standing near a bevy of sabal palms thriving in the dappled light of two Mexican oaks, about 30 feet tall, with dark evergreen leaves. "Mexico is supposedly the center of distribution for all oaks," added Mr. Fairey, who has about 170 of the 250 known species. By the time the continents diverged, birds had already carried their seeds to America. He didn't realize agaves liked shade until he saw them growing under pines in the Sierra Madre Oriental. Mr. Fairey's love affair with Mexico began in 1988, when Lynn Lowery, the late plant explorer and Texas nurseryman, invited him and Carl Schoenfeld, who had begun working at the garden as a college student, on a plant-hunting expedition. Mr. Schoenfeld is now the owner of Yucca Do Nursery, in Giddings, Tex., which he founded with Mr. Fairey in 1986, at the garden, to sell their overflow of rare plants. "We drove from here to Laredo, which is in the desert, to Monterrey and up into the mountains," Mr. Fairey said. And it opened up a new path. As they drove up the one-lane rutted switchbacks, with a sheer drop of 2,000 feet on one side and a 1,500-foot cliff rising on the other, they watched plants appear with each new elevation, as giant yuccas gave way to agaves and oaks. When the road ended, they would pitch their tents next to the truck and hike into the forest. Mr. Lowery taught them the basics of collecting seeds, and how to germinate them back home. "How to clean seeds, where some of the things were, how to package things, how to get them back into the country, how to identify them," said Mr. Fairey, who had no formal training as a botanist or gardener. Over the years, they took some 80 expeditions together into these mountains and the surrounding desert, four of them with Mr. Lowery. One inspired Mr. Fairey to plant sabal palms under a grove of Mexican pines (Pinus pseudostrobus) with long, graceful needles.