“You realize, wow, we really don’t have that many pages. “Roughing in the dummy was the informative part,” Eric says. His mother tells him about the Night Gardener, who appeared on their street a century ago and trimmed each tree to look like an animal. A boy notices a tree outside his house that is shaped vaguely like an owl, and he asks his mother about it. In the first dummy Terry and Eric submitted, the entire story was a flashback, a device that reflects their screenwriting days. He’s an incredible potter.” Growing up with a father who revered all growing things gave the brothers’ story its spark. “He’s a beekeeper, he breeds parrots, he has peacocks, roosters, horses, dogs, all kinds of birds.” Eric adds: “He grows all his own vegetables. When Terry and Eric talk about him, the words tumble out. Even in the city he kept birds and grew trees. Terry and Eric’s father, who used to be a philosophy professor in Toronto, now lives in rural Taiwan. The story’s hero, the topiary artist who works quiet miracles, drew inspiration from a source close to home. “Everybody was so encouraging and so supportive.” The picture of the moonlight tree trimmer grew into The Night Gardener (Feb.). “We were a bit out of our depth at first,” Terry says. Hall offered it to Bromley, who leapt at the chance to work with the brothers again she championed the book at S&S, and editor Christian Trimmer joined the team. They knew there was a story there, they just had to work it out. They thought of a drawing they had worked on together that pictured a man on a ladder under a full moon, trimming a tree in the shape of an owl. Hall asked the brothers for story ideas to pitch. She emailed him and asked if he was interested in representation. Kirsten Hall, who was setting up her own agency, Catbird Productions, found Terry online not long after he’d finished working on Rooftoppers.
That was Terry’s first publishing assignment he did the interior illustrations for the book as well.
Simon & Schuster executive art director Lizzy Bromley discovered Terry’s artwork online while searching for a cover artist for Katherine Rundell’s Rooftoppers (2014). Their years at the Ontario College of Art and Design overlapped, and they spent several years cowriting screenplays (yielding several tantalizing leads but no sales). When they were a little older, they painted an undersea paradise on the walls of the bedroom they shared at their home in Toronto. They were drawing before they could read or write, and they still have the first book they produced (it was about dinosaurs). They’re brothers-Terry’s a year and a half older-and they’ve been making things together for decades. Terry and Eric Fan are accustomed to collaborating.
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