Timothy Morton is a professional gardener who doesn’t like being hemmed in. He is also a musician who doesn’t blow his horn, an accomplished actor who shuns auditions, and an observational filmmaker who doesn’t steer the narrative.

Tim is at home, with a garden, in Louisville’s south end, halfway up a knobby hillside of New Providence shale, formed from an ancient, shallow sea that was uplifted by the Cincinnati Arch over 430 million years ago.

He’s not the first person to wander Kenwood Hill surrounded by white oaks, pignut hickories, and tulip poplars.

The talented artist has a preternatural sense that he is only a bit player in the Anthropocene.

I am impressed by how Tim has dug into his young garden at the intersection at Possum Path and Kenwood Hill Road. There’s nothing fancy or fussy about the garden, which has a comfortable, unhurried feeling. It is also receiving a boost from the superpowers of swallowtails, tadpoles, and dragonflies.

Creativity with limitations

Tim lives on a .75-acre lot in a 1950s ranch-style home with his wife Ivy Jackson. She tends the vegetable garden and fruit trees; he encourages a garden of Kentucky native plants. Tim is not unyielding. “Gardening is like playing music, acting or film editing. It’s trial and error,” he told me. “It’s okay to rearrange bits in music, film and gardening.” (He is a clawhammer-style banjo player.)

There’s a lot going on in his garden. Tim comes from the Not-a Showoff School of Gardening. He apologized for overgrown native seedlings sprouting in plastic, one-gallon water jugs. “I need to get these planted soon,” he told me in early April a year ago.

2020

A few weeks later he commented, “Nothing particularly stunning at the moment. Some of my small, discreet shrubs have, or just had, blooms, but it’ll be years before they have a visual impact.

“Hoping it would be wall to wall plants. The garden is still in its infancy.”

2024 was the garden’s 4th year.

“Gardening is the slowest of the performing arts.”

  –Mac Griswold

By late May last year, Tim complained, “I want more blooms this time of year.”

AB: “Are you getting greedy?”

Tim: “Ha, yeah maybe.”

By late June the buttonbushes, lead plants, hypericums, spiderworts, coral honeysuckles, and mountain mint were putting on a show.

August 2, 2025

Tim is philosophical but not mossbacked

“Native plant landscaping, with Kentucky native species, feels both novel and innovative, promoting biodiversity over uniformity. For me, it’s a response to the overly sterile, lifeless spaces we tend to inhabit in modern daily life.”

I poked fun at his beautiful bottlebrush buckeye, an uncommon to rare endemic in Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina, but unknown in Kentucky’s wilderness. If you were keeping score on an All-Kentucky Native Garden, this could be a technical disqualifier, but close enough. It looks happy on Kenwood Hill.

An old patch of bearded iris got a green card.  The iris came with the property when Tim and Ivy bought the place in 2020.

So did unwelcome exotic offenders. Tim has battled bush honeysuckle like a pro. He is a pro. A label Tim doesn’t like.

Vernal spring, home to swallowtails, tadpoles and dragonflies.

Kentucky native seedlings

Foxglove beardtongue, Penstemon digitalis.

Virginia spiderwort, Tradescantia virginiana.

A gardening life that began with weeds

Crystal, North Dakota (population:116) in the Great Plains, near the geographical center of North America, deserves credit for lighting a fire underneath Tim. The family drove there to visit his grandmother each summer. (Only a one-page, front and back, laminated “phonebook” was needed for all the townspeople and businesses.) His grandmother kept a garden that needed weeding. Siblings and cousins came in handy. “My grandmother paid us one cent per weed to pull the weeds,” he told me proudly. There was a gas station up the road where they could take their hard-earned pennies and load up on candy. “My poor mom had to sit there and count the weeds out of the bucket, but we didn’t get a cent unless those weeds had a root on them. She was about quality not just quantity.”

I met Tim in 2013 when he was working with a motivated landscape crew for the Olmsted Parks Conservancy, rehabbing a damaged ecosystem. They cleared hundreds of acres of bush honeysuckle, over four years, in the Olmsted-designed Cherokee Park. The evil shrub had grabbed a foothold in the deciduous forest following the devastating 1974 tornado that wiped out thousands of trees. The payoff was the return of native spring ephemeral wildflowers that had been shaded out by the invasive honeysuckle.

Tim’s name kept popping up in other creative realms that I didn’t know about. He was planting gardens, playing banjo in bands around town, and acting. Tim had a co-leading role in the award-winning independent film—Men Go to Battle (Tribeca 2015). There were only a few scripted lines. Most were ad libbed. He likes spontaneity. The spontaneous rhythms of the garden suit him to a T as well.

The Sacred Harp

I had no idea until last year that Tim was also a filmmaker.

He is putting the polishing touches on a documentary, six years in the making, called: Singing the Shapes—Songs of the Enduring Sacred Harp. Watch the trailer here.

“A thunderous four-part harmony echoes across time in Singing the Shapes, an immersive journey into Sacred Harp singing—a raw, communal tradition born in 19th-century America and still shaking the rafters today. Rooted in Southern church houses and reborn in cities around the world, this living tradition draws together people from all walks of life to sing shoulder-to-shoulder in the hollow square.”

“My garden is working with life forms. This film has also had a life of its own as well. I didn’t feel that way about the film at first. It only started feeling that way when the connections between the parts started to make sense in a way that was not what I had originally conceived. There was an epiphany. The film began to feel alive with an energy I can’t take credit for.”

Tim’s garden installation at Louisville’s Pizza Lupo.

It is hard for diverse people to communicate with one another in a polarized world. The Sacred Harp is having a renaissance. Singers from vastly different walks of life are welcomed in small towns and big cities to sing four notes. They find mutual respect, regardless of who you are or where you came from. Here, in community, they sing songs from the Sacred Harp Hymnal and feel the harmonized blessing of “joyful noise.”

Photo from Bloomington, Indiana Sacred Harp Singers

Next month hundreds of Sacred Harp singers from around the world will gather in Atlanta to sing new compositions from the first revision of the Sacred Harp Hymnal, since 1991: 113 songs, among 1,100 submissions, were selected. Tim knows most of the new composers. He called the new compositions lifetime achievements. The first Sacred Harp Hymnal was published in 1844 in Hamilton, Georgia.

Ivy and Tim lead a song during  a shape-note singing school at Louisville’s Woodbine Chamber in May.

Tim will be in Atlanta to sing these new songs. He wouldn’t miss for anything the opportunity to celebrate another milestone in the living tradition of the Sacred Harp.

Swallowtails, tadpoles and dragonflies will need to make it for five days without him.

Tim is not worried at all.