Guitar and Garden

You might know Deuce Gibb as the front man for the Martini Bros.  You might know him as a talented hairdresser and owner of Deuce Gibb Salon.

If you know him, you probably also know that he races dirt bikes; loves hot rods and motorcycles.

But you probably don’t know that Deuce Gibb loves the way a nasturtium leaf cradles a drop of water after a rain.

“It’s about balance,” said Gibb.  “ I have balance in many ways in my life.”

Deuce Gibb at the mic during a Martini Bros. show on Saint Patricks Day

For Gibb, the macho quality of playing rock and roll is softened by his work as a hairdresser.  The tough-guy motorcycle freak is balanced by the nurturing quality of gardening.

He likes to watch things grow.

Walking with him through his garden, it’s clear that Deuce is closely watching the development of his plants.  Pointing out what’s soon to bloom, he lowers his voice and gently touches the stem of a hibiscus just below the bud.  Noting how quickly cilantro goes to seed, he says he’s letting it flower and thinking it might self seed for next spring. With a happy lift in the pace of his words, he tells me his water lilies are flowering more this year.

He says he just sits and watches the fish in his pond sometimes. I can’t imagine Deuce sitting still very long, but I can imagine him enjoying the sounds of his waterfall mixed with soft chimes responding to the wind while tending his vegetable garden.

He’s genuinely jazzed about the progress of his tomatoes.  He had fruit on his plants a good bit before I had fruit on mine. He is training squash to climb upward on a trellis. He uses grass clippings on his veggie garden to keep down the weeds and add nitrogen back into the soil.

About a week after I walked his garden with him, Deuce stopped by to show me a tomato leaf.  I told him that I thought it was late blight and said there was little hope.  Undaunted, he armed himself with an organic fungicide and went into battle.

It’s good I was wrong and it’s good Deuce kept fighting because his tomatoes are now pristine green and caged in a nearly six foot column.  It must have been early blight or another less serious fungus that had browned a few of the leaves of his plants.

Deuce added garden shovel to his list of axes when he bought his first house.  He started with wildflowers in back and annual flowers in front of his home.  He recalls ladies walking by his home.

“They said, tell your wife her flowers are pretty. ” he said.  He asked them why they assumed he wasn’t the gardener in the family.  But he knew.  ” Most guys are into hardscapes, you know.  They leave tending the marigolds to the old lady.”

While gardening adds to balance,  true to the rebel nature of a musician, Deuce does provide a home for just one bad boy plant.  It’s beautiful and purple and highly invasive.  I am not to judge when it comes to invasives, though.  My yard is a battle of the invasives.  Maybe I have a little rebel in my soul.

Deuce lives in New Cumberland, PA with his wife, Michele, and children Eli and Lydia.