Faye Bishop shows off the pipe tree in the front yard of her home in Jackson. A former boyfriend made it for her 35 years ago. JONATHAN ERNST/STAFF

Home front: Pipe tree just right for owner

Woman who owns diner enjoys time in her garden, which features unusual ornament

Web posted June 29, 1998

By Wendy Grossman
Staff Writer

Like rusted elephant trunks or the reaching arms of Vishnu holding bouquets of petunias, Faye Bishop's pipe tree squats on her front lawn.

``I've loved it forever,'' said Ms. Bishop's daughter, Dana Bishop, 46. She and her twin 17-year-old daughters live with her mother at 617 Third St. Extension in Jackson.

``That pipe tree is my mamma. It's creative, unique and unusual,'' Dana Bishop said.

Faye Bishop, 71, wakes up every day at 5 a.m. to open her diner on South Carolina Highway 125, a comfortable place with tables of laughing, smiling regulars eating cozy country cooking.

``I go up in the morning before everybody gets there and turn everything on and make the old fashioned grits. I cook them a long time and make them better,'' she said recently.

They're all her own recipes tucked away in her head.

``It's good old down-country fat-back stuff,'' Dana Bishop said.

Click on the map above to see a larger version.DAVID ARBANAS/STAFF

Faye Bishop is famous locally and among area travelers for her homemade vegetable soup, broccoli casserole and cole slaw. People from as far as Oregon, Wisconsin and New Mexico have heard of her cuisine from truckers or people passing through from Augusta's Masters Tournament each spring.

If she's not behind the stove, she's running the cash register or sitting on a stool behind the counter smiling and talking to the dirt-booted construction workers or suited Savannah River Site employees. She knows just about everyone.

``I'm just working and working. Whatever comes up, I do,'' Faye Bishop said.

She locks up around 8 p.m., then goes home to her garden to relax.

``From the time she closes until the dark runs her in, she's out in the yard,'' Dana Bishop said of her mother.

While on a road trip 35 years ago, Faye Bishop saw a teeny-tiny limbed pipe tree with vines reaching around it, swallowing it up.

``I just started dreaming about how it would look,'' she said. ``I decided I wanted one.''

She was dating a plumber, so she asked him to build one for her. He told her it would be better with big, thick septic tank pipes so she could plant flowers in its branches.

``He had it fixed one afternoon when I went home,'' Faye Bishop recalled. ``It wasn't exactly what I wanted. But he'd done it better than I had described.''

Her daughter wasn't jumping up and down when she came home from school and saw it.

``Momma, you're not going to put that thing up,'' Dana Bishop told her. But she did.

The nearly six-foot milk chocolate- and rust-colored tree has scared the daylights out of Dana Bishop a number of times -- especially one night right after she got her driver's license.

``I remember getting out of the car, and I just froze in my steps because I thought it was a man standing there,'' she recalled. ``I didn't know whether I should scream or hit him with my purse.''

When she realized it was just her momma's pipe tree, she felt like an idiot.

``I do that all the time,'' said Martha Bishop, one of Dana Bishop's daughters.

In the daylight, it's more flower pot than scarecrow.

Last year Faye Bishop planted peace plants, pansies and petunias in the pipe tree. The year before, she had bright orange and red fire combs.

``Me and my grandmother spent all day in Lowe's. We bought at least $100 worth of flowers and planted them in the pipe tree the last two summers,'' said Faye Bishop's other twin granddaughter, Melissa. ``We could put Lowe's out of business.''

For art class, Melissa was assigned to paint a picture of whatever she saw outside her window. In the family's living room hangs her painting with the pipe tree smack in the center.

``It wouldn't be our house if the pipe tree wasn't there,'' Dana Bishop said. ``It's withstood all the ... `whatevers' that have blown in the yard.''