The Pinelands' wild and weird flora fascinate this genteel gentleman. Not so the common marigold or "pale, pale roses" in many home gardens. "Boring, boring, boring," he complains. Give him voodoo lilies with roadkill stink, angel's trumpets with rouged-up mouths, and Venus flytraps with malicious intent!
The man is intense. Hates etiquette, loves manners. Hates rainbow perennial beds, loves bogs, which, in the gardening world, are considered pretty nerdy. Too scientific, and oddball, for most.
Yet that's the draw for Crawford. Bogs are sensitive and nutrient-poor, with evocative cedar-topped mounds and silent brown water. Attractive, repulsive - exactly!
Crawford's nascent bog garden, 9 feet long, 5 feet wide and a foot deep, seems a perfect fit for a guy who calls himself Lord Whimsy.
In his 2006 book, The Affected Provincial's Companion, Volume One (Bloomsbury Publishing, $14.95), Crawford - a native of eastern Kentucky who did most of his growing up in Somers Point - invented the persona of Lord Breaulove Swells Whimsy, a dandy who lives to entertain and "reawaken the poetry of the human soul."
It's a strange little book, billed as "a bounteous selection of essays, philosophical diagrams, poetry, and other Arcadian follies concerning the art of curious living and the reintroduction of ancient charm into this vale of mud and tears known heretofore as the modern life."
No joke. Shortly after the book's publication, Johnny Depp bought the movie rights. Crawford pinched himself, then splurged on the linen suit he's wearing today.
So he's in character, assuming a mask fashioned around the contours of his own personality.
"It allows me to be myself, only more so," says Crawford, who isn't always dolled up like a middle-aged Fauntleroy.
