Jerry Kluver: Gardening star here April 30

By ANDREW MCGINN
a.mcginn@beeherald.com

Jerry Kluver was clearly in the wrong place at the wrong time this past December when a pickup truck veered off Interstate 80/35 in Des Moines and smashed into his own pickup on a side street below.

But in the back of the ambulance en route to Mercy Medical Center, the paramedic attending to the affable gardening expert had a question for him.

“Do you really get that many questions about creeping charlie?” Kluver remembers her asking.

By the time the ambulance reached the hospital, everybody was in stitches.

The figurative kind.

“You can’t be rude to people if you’re Jerry Kluver,” the man himself, now 69, reasoned last week by phone from his home away from home at the Hy-Vee garden center in Urbandale.

Kluver, a household name in central Iowa thanks to TV and radio appearances, will visit Jefferson on April 30 to talk all things gardening as part of Spring Into Greene, the Greene County Chamber of Commerce’s daylong home and garden show at the Greene County courthouse.

Kluver’s appearance at 11 a.m. in the Thomas Jefferson Gardens, at the corner of Lincoln Way and Chestnut Street, is co-sponsored by Jefferson Matters: Main Street and Jefferson Garden Club.

At this point, it’s sort of impossible to fathom anyone in the Des Moines television market not knowing how to kill creeping charlie, seeing as how Kluver has been dispensing advice on how to slay it for decades.

“It will kill your lawn,” he said of the perennial creeper formally known as Glechoma hederacea.

Only recently, though, did Kluver gain some new insight into creeping charlie when someone informed him that bees are especially drawn to its flowers.

Because of that, one particular guy told Kluver he’s in no hurry to rid it from his yard.

“He doesn’t give a rip if it takes his shingles off,” Kluver said.

Could it be, then, that creeping charlie is just misunderstood, the plant world’s equivalent of the Frankenstein monster?

Nah.

Come April 30, Kluver is going to talk plenty about how to kill it dead.

“Eliminate would be a more politically correct term,” he said.

Ironically, Kluver was almost done in himself this past December by, well, a plant.

“The guy was full of cannabis,” Kluver said of the driver whose truck came careening off I-80.

Just a month before, Kluver, who has more than a dozen grandchildren, had made the decision to start slowing down, going to part-time with Hy-Vee.

For nearly 25 years, Kluver shilled, and shilled very well, for Earl May Nursery and Garden Center in Des Moines, having moved there in 1983 to run the company’s metro-area stores.

When he chose to retire in 2007, Hy-Vee was quick to scoop up and transplant the Crawford County native.

“I retired on a Thursday,” Kluver recalled. “On Monday, I got hired by Hy-Vee.”

The man who calls himself “a walking encyclopedia” has no fancy degree in horticulture.

“I don’t have one lick of college,” he said.

Growing up in the Charter Oak/Ute area, he simply didn’t have the money to go to college.

He instead learned everything he needed to know about plants and gardening while on the job at the Earl May store in Cedar Rapids in 1969.

Kluver soaked up knowledge like it was Miracle-Gro.

Once he got in front of the TV cameras, everything just bloomed — a local celebrity was born.

“My wife won’t go shopping with me at Christmas,” Kluver said.

It seems he can’t go anywhere without being asked gardening questions.

“I get asked in church. I get asked in the post office,” he said. “I get asked in the hospital.”

Kluver believes his truthfulness has carried him this far.

Manure typically makes good fertilizer — but Kluver doesn’t BS.

Ask him about the hardest plant to grow and he’ll quickly answer: a china doll.

“It’s a houseplant that just likes to die,” he said. “I wouldn’t buy a china doll from me even if I sold it.

“People like the truth.”

How to go
Who: Gardening expert and TV personality Jerry Kluver
When: 11 a.m. April 30
Where: Thomas Jefferson Gardens, downtown Jefferson, as part of Spring Into Greene (in case of rain, Kluver moves to Homestead Coffee and Bakery)
Admission: Free
Also of interest: Gardening enthusiasts won’t want to miss a program by local bonsai expert Lynn Menz at 1 p.m. that day at the Greene County courthouse.