I have for several years been divesting books. Many have gone to good homes. The inspiration to declutter—a bit—came from an essay written in 1931 by German philosopher Walter Benjamin, who appraised the joy and challenge of a career with books in his essay: “Unpacking My Library.”

While unpacking my garden library, I found myself returning to Bobby Ward’s biography of J.C. Raulston, Chlorophyll in His Veins.

My small garden library holds decades of memories. There are books and journals that have been read and reread. Some weren’t worth keeping after a single reading. Others shame me because they are preserved but not read. (Caroline Dorman’s Natives Preferred may be read before the end of this year…)

Fairchild, and Hinkley—the plant explorers—are there on my bookshelves. So are favorite garden writers—Jenks Farmer, Pamela Harper, Allen Lacy, Panayoti Kelaidis, Elizabeth Lawrence, and Christopher Lloyd.

Bobby Ward has unpacked J.C. Raulston’s (1940-1996) restless and remarkable life. First published in 2009, the revised and updated version of Chlorophyll in His Veins: J.C. Raulston, Horticultural Ambassador will be released later this month, including nearly 50 images featuring 25 color plates that had not appeared in the first edition.

Ward’s excellent book will remain on my bookshelf. I cannot look at the first edition’s green binding without thinking about the call I got the morning after J.C. died in 1996. Ward knew J.C. and many of his friends.

J.C. Raulston was beloved

He was, as Joe Eck and Wayne Winterowd said, “the glue that held the horticultural community together. Nurseryman friend, Marion Redd, joked that J.C. could have been the lovechild of North Carolina writers Elizabeth Lawrence and William Lanier Hunt. Raulston possessed a will of his own.

James Chester Raulston was raised in small-town Lucid, Oklahoma, surrounded by a spare native landscape of red cedar, Osage orange, scrub oak, and cottonwood. His perfectionist father was an oil company mechanic who grew wheat and raised beef cattle on the side. His doting mother was a homemaker who encouraged her precocious only child to read and provided a “safe haven” in the family’s garden. J.C.’s fertile imagination was stoked. He had his first growing success at age eight with sweet peas.

Age four with his mother in the family’s Oklahoma wheat field. Courtesy of J. C. Raulston Estate.

Age thirteen, eighth grade class photo. Courtesy of J. C. Raulston Estate

Age 28, graduate school, University of Maryland. Courtesy of the J.C. Raulston Estate.

University of Florida (1972.) Courtesy of J. C. Raulston Estate.

Professor Raulston directed students with far more than plants 

Years later, in lectures, J.C. would mention Frances Hodgson’s The Secret Garden as a life-long influence. Others confided to J.C. that The Secret Garden had also been an early inspiration.

His students could be indulged with banana split parties and road trips to visit gardens and nurseries with unexpected stops. A roadside stand with fresh peaches or chili peppers was never passed up.

Great Wall of China (1981). Courtesy of JCRA Digital Collection at NCSU.

Photographing a garden in the U.K. (1988) Courtesy of Marion Redd

Meeting plantsman Roy Lancaster in the U.K. (1995). Courtesy of Darrin Duling

J.C. primed the pump with his own money

Begun in 1976, The North Carolina State University Arboretum in Raleigh, North Carolina, was restrained initially by faculty headwinds and a small budget. Naysayers said J.C. was an “idealist.” The eight-acre arboretum couldn’t survive, they said. A tiny, devoted staff and dozens of volunteers pressed on.

For years the Friends of the NCSU Arboretum Newsletter, often notoriously late, was essential reading. J.C prefaced each edition with an amusing apology for its tardiness. Topics covered his extensive and exhausting travels, thoughts, and news from the garden, concluding with his signature quote: Plan and Plant for a Better World.

J.C. was renowned for freely distributing new plants to plant growers. A few weeks before his death in December 1996, he sent his last connoisseur plant distribution list to arboretum friends and donors with a selection of 101 new plants. Each form letter was personalized with a handwritten note.

Renamed the J.C. Raulston Arboretum after his death, the garden remains a horticultural you-don’t-want-to miss-this destination.

There are several popular J.C lectures included in Chlorophyll in His Veins

“The Fifty Most Fascinating Plants I’ve Ever Met” was presented in 1993 to the Oklahoma Greenhouse Growers and Oklahoma Nurserymen’s associations. He speaks of plants he has encountered from childhood throughout his life.” These include Emotion/Memory Plants to Show/Spectacle Plants. “No gardener can possibly ever find & have every plant lusted after—but no one will ever stop trying either.”

“Joys of Horticultural Deviance: Tweaking the Solemnity of Mainstream Gardening” compares the ends of the spectrum, from those who spend little or nothing on their gardens to the hardcore who dig in without restraint. In a 1995 Seattle lecture to the North American Rock Garden Society, illustrating deviance, J.C. said, “Your group is truly deviant. You pile rocks up in piles when everybody else in gardening digs the rocks out and carries them away until their soil is stone free.”

J.C. would be proud 

Tony Avent, a student of J.C.’s, who co-founded the popular Plant Delights Nursery, wrote a new foreword in this year’s revised edition of Chlorophyll. Avent has plans to turn over his Juniper Level Botanic Garden into a public garden in association with the J.C. Raulston Arboretum. The garden’s director, Mark Weathington, wrote a new afterword.

There are few North Americans who have left the indelible, horticultural (green) impression that J.C. Raulston did.

J.C. Raulston and former student Richard Olsen at the NCSU Arboretum Garden Gala (1996). Olsen is now the Director of the National Arboretum in Washington, D.C. Courtesy of JCRA Digital Collection at NCSU.

Set aside a few evenings for Chlorophyll in His Veins: J.C. Raulston, Horticultural Ambassador. Bobby Ward’s biography should be read by anyone with an interest in a charismatic, yet personally modest crusader who inspired a generation of ornamental plant growers and garden makers.

The book can be pre-ordered now with a 30% discount if purchased through UNC Press using this promo code at checkout: 01SOCIAL30. (See link below.) The book will be officially launched at the JC Raulston Arboretum on Thursday, April 9, 2026, at 6:30 p.m.