nybody who has listened to National Public Radio's ''Car Talk'' program knows that Ray Magliozzi is not your average car mechanic. There is his quirky sense of humor, that trademark irreverence, and, of course, his knowledge of a little bit about almost anything. Some days he dispenses advice to the lovelorn, other days he analyzes the cost and benefits of a new transmission, and every week he and his brother, Tom, make Americans chuckle.
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What listeners do not generally know is that Ray Magliozzi, a.k.a. ''Clack'' (to his brother's ''Click"), is a serious gardener. He lives in a modest ranch house with a large lot tucked away on a back street in a suburb of Boston.
Magliozzi has not always been a gardener. He grew up in Cambridge - a ''city kid,'' he says - and knew next to nothing about growing things. The only gardener in his family was his grandmother, who had immigrated from Italy and grew one very pampered fig tree and lots of grapes. She had a huge grape press and made wine in the cellar. Magliozzi figures gardening is part of his heritage.
It's fun to talk plants with him, because he is full of enthusiasm and wonder about growing things. When Ray and Monique, his wife of 31 years, bought their first house, he cut the grass, but only ''grudgingly.'' He wasn't interested in growing things. There was a bare spot, though, where the previous owners had placed a swing set. He seeded it and watered it, and the grass grew.
''That hooked me,'' he says. ''The fact that you could plant a seed and grow something. ... It's a miracle!''
As his two sons were growing up, he didn't have much time for gardening, but one year Magliozzi and the boys planted some pumpkin seeds and then forgot about them. While they were out in the Grand Canyon on a three-week vacation that summer, Magliozzi called his father, who was looking after his house.
''There is something growing in your yard. It's huge. What should I do?'' asked his father. They came back to find a pumpkin vine had taken over the yard. ''One day a pumpkin was the size of a golf ball, the next day it was a softball,'' he recalls. ''You could hear it grow!''
Now 52, Magliozzi started getting serious about gardening in his early 40s. He and Monique bought their current house partly because it had a huge yard, but also because they first saw it when all the rhododendrons were in bloom. It seemed like a little Eden to them.
In his early days of gardening, Magliozzi had a golf-course-perfect lawn. Now, he is totally organic, partly due to his conviction that a beloved border collie died after repeated exposure to lawn chemicals. He doesn't have time to deal with the lawn himself anymore, but he found a landscaper who uses fish fertilizers and other natural products.
''Everything I put on the lawn, you could eat,'' he says.
In late summer, when you step out his back door, you're greeted by trumpets - angel's trumpets, that is, an 8-foot bed of them. Magliozzi encountered angel's trumpets outside a restaurant on the Cape. He liked them, so he got some little seedlings there the following year but found they didn't transplant well. He persisted. He gathered seeds in March and planted them.
''Before I knew it, I had a jungle.'' Now they reseed every year.
Magliozzi asks questions, he tries different approaches, and he doesn't give up. When he finally succeeds in growing something, he is pleased as punch. ''I love to smell them at night,'' he says with a grin. '' I go from one to another like I'm the pollinator.''
He planted a southern magnolia eight years ago, and it's doing quite well despite being at the northern edge of where those trees usually survive. After one tough winter, the tree appeared dead in the spring. It produced no leaves. Magliozzi, however, had a hunch that it was down but not out. His neighbor encouraged him to remove it, even offering to help, but Magliozzi held out. To everyone's surprise, the next spring it leafed out.
Roses are one of Magliozzi's pleasures, and he has figured out a way to help his hybrid tea roses survive New England winters. He knows the drying winds are what kill them most often, so he protects his roses by spraying them with an antidessicant late each fall, usually waiting until December. He also has been known to put up plywood barricades near his roses to break the wind in winter. He pointed out that planting stuff is always a gamble, and he doesn't mind buying a few new roses to replace those that have been killed off by the weather.
Magliozzi acknowledges a common thread between his two passions, working on cars and growing things: ''Dirt. But garden dirt washes off more easily.'' He laughs. ''The reason I love gardening is that I love getting my hands dirty.'' He pauses for a moment, then adds, ''When we fix cars, it's not all science. There's an art to it, too.''
There is art in Magliozzi's gardens, too. And although they are not likely to appear on the pages of a glossy garden magazine, they give him great pleasure, which is, after all, what gardeners strive for.
