Craig LeHoullier wrote the epic tome on tomatoes—a bestseller, Epic Tomatoes: How to Select and Grow the Best Varieties of All Time. These days, he co-teaches classes about epic tomatoes alongside Joe Lamp’l, the “Joe Gardener” of PBS’s Emmy Award-winning Growing a Greener World. And now, it just so happens that a certain country-pop superstar appreciates LeHoullier’s longtime labors with the fruit.
“I became a fan of Craig’s through Joe Gardener and the virtual courses that they do together to help people like me grow epic tomatoes,” Carrie Underwood emails TOWN about the Hendersonville resident widely known as the NC Tomato Man.
In 1981—the same year, incidentally, that the legendary singer-songwriter Guy Clark wrote “Homegrown Tomatoes”—LeHoullier was working on his Ph.D. in chemistry at Dartmouth. That’s when he and his wife, Susan, started a garden. A few years later, when he wasn’t playing guitar in a rock band, he planted the first heirloom seed that he now admits blossomed into an uncontrolled passion. “No. 1 was purchased in 1986. And now I’m on tomato No. 7,855,” he says of the number of plants he has grown over four decades.
In January 2020, he and Susan, now married forty-one years, moved from Raleigh to Hendersonville. Susan retired twenty years ago as a nurse, and he worked for twenty-five years at GlaxoSmithKline, the pharmaceutical giant. “Science,” he says, “directly leads to how I garden: the data management, the management of the variables.”
Likewise, as Lamp’l puts it: “Craig’s depth of experience as a scientist and analytical mind, combined with his passion for gardening, especially growing tomatoes, makes him a rare and treasured resource to me and gardeners everywhere.”
A Historian of Tomatoes
LeHoullier sees himself as a hybrid of a garden-variety green-thumb evangelist and Gregor Mendel, the nineteenth-century Austrian monk considered the father of modern genetics. “Half of me is a tomato historian and the other half of me is the monk sitting in the garden,” he says. “Except instead of playing with peas, I’m playing with tomatoes and peppers and eggplant.”
Alas, he remains firmly planted in what he calls America’s most popular garden edible. But you don’t see much of the lab nerd as he reclines in his backyard amid hay bales and raised beds where he would grow up to two hundred plants a year. Harvests yielded as many as seventy-five pounds a month during the height of the heaviest growing seasons.
Of tomatoes’ twelve-thousand-odd varieties, he has had four-thousand-plus types of seeds and has tasted at least that many; meanwhile, Americans consume something along the lines of five to ten types, he says. Therein lies his explanation for a fruitful passion that took off like a weed: “The only crops to me that match the tomato in terms of diversity—and we’re talking about diversity of shape, size, color—would be maybe apples and maybe melons.”
He started making a name for himself in the early ’90s. In 1993, someone sent him some seeds from Tennessee, along with a letter explaining that a Cherokee Indian had given them to the sender’s grandfather a century ago. Thus was born a variety LeHoullier called the Cherokee Purple; he has named several other favorites showcased in the Seed Savers Exchange, a gardening bible. And he stores several thousand seeds he has extracted from the fruits that contain 92 percent water.
His salad days are pretty much over as the full-time harvester who used to pick as many as seventy-five pounds a day at the height of the growing season. Today, he continues to work with the Dwarf Tomato Project, which he co-founded, and he coaches and teaches, through podcasts and virtual appearances.
“Even to this day, I’m always amazed when I’m gonna Zoom or something and somebody shows up to see me speak because it’s like I’m Everyman, I’m a gardener, I get my hands dirty. What we’re trying to do is get gardeners to be thinking gardeners.”
Underwood clicks in among those who dig what he’s planted. “Craig’s love of gardening is genuine and honest and infectious,” she exclaims, “and I always look forward to learning tips from the master!”
Photography by Paul Mehaffey
