More About the Author
Born on a dairy farm in Maryville, Missouri, I treasure the time I spent growing up playing with puppies, riding horses and helping my grandparents in their vegetable garden.
When my father became the Far East Director of the American Soybean Institute, my family moved to Japan, where I lived for 6 years and attended 5th-10th grades at the American School in Japan near Tokyo.
I returned to the mid-west to major in ornamental horticulture at Purdue University, in Indiana. As an undergraduate, I had internships at Kingwood Center, in Mansfield Ohio, and Longwood Gardens, in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania and I also returned to Japan to spend a semester working with Japanese gardeners. After graduating, I spent time--a year-- in Europe, working at Kalmthout Arboretum in Belgium, a garden famous for witch-hazel introductions, followed by stints in 2 private gardens in France, one in Normandy, one in Brittany.
I then went back to graduate school at Purdue to study horticultural editing and tissue culture. I continued graduate school studies at the University of Delaware where I was a Longwood Graduate Fellow studying public horticulture in a unique program sponsored by Longwood Gardens.
The Delaware Valley is rich with public gardens, so following graduate school I've stayed in the region, first working at Mt. Cuba Center, a public garden devoted to native plants, where I worked for 7 years, and then in 1990 I became the director of the Scott Arboretum, the campus of Swarthmore College, just outside of Philadelphia, a position I still enjoy today.
