Hey guys. I am pretty new to gardening but enjoy what I do with it. My favorite plant would have to be the Moon Flower. I like to grow aquatic plants as well. Scuba
Hi Scuba, I am certified PADI, but have real problem with my ears so now I am a snorkel buddy. As to gardening, well I was born in California and never had a place of my own. Met my Oregonian husband in San Jose and moved to the great northwest in 1984. Fell in love with Japanese Maples. Now I have a small nursery. No employees, just me and I get up each day with a smile on my face and I finally get to do exactly what I want to do - enjoy nature and its rewards. I am a passionate maple-holic. Whatever you grow, it doesn't matter because their is joy and fullfillment whenever you interact with nature. I can hardly wait until Daylight savings time - then I can spend 10 hours a day outside, yahoooo! Sam
Careful about that diving! It leads to running around the tropical world and that leads to seeing a lot of neat plants. I started 36 years ago and was lucky enough to start writing articles for several dive magazines. The magazines sent me all over the tropics and I wanted to grow just about everything I saw. It's a big circle and one is just as addictive as the other. You never know what diving may cause you to grow! Here's a little link you might get a kick out of: http://www.exoticrainforest.com/Cozumel diver.html You can just skip the first few photos!! And by the way, if you dive, buy an underwater camera!
Photopro, Wow, what a cool job and what a cool website. I would rather visit South America than Europe. Yep, I too get tropic fever. I am trying to create a tropical garden in one well protected corner of my display garden. I have a hardy banana and a Windmill Palm, still in pots though in the greenhouse. We just got back from Hawaii - I need a vacation from the cold of the Northwest and with the nursery all I an manage is 2 weeks away in December, so Hawaii is the ticket. I get sun, snorkel in pristine water and read lots of books, then its back to the cold. The hummingbirds arrive in 34 days so spring is right around the corner. Sam
Believe me, it was more luck than planning. In 1980 I wrote an article just for the fun about a little lobster we saw off Jamaica that had peppermint striped claws. I called it the Peppermint Stick Lobster and the article ran in Skin Diver Magazine. Today, that little lobster is called the Peppermint Stick lobster (Justicia longimanus) by dive masters all over he Caribbean! The publisher of Skln Diver liked the article and offered me a job. For the next 8 years I lived on "vacation" and ran all over the world and Caribbean at their expense taking pictures and writing articles. Not a bad way to make a living. The one thing I owe diving was it introduced me to my love of tropical plants. Now I spend most of my time writing articles about exotic plants. Funny how things happen. When I retired, and travel was no longer easy, I decided to build my own rain forest in my back yard. Last week we had snow and it was still 80 degrees in the "rain forest". Strange how things happen! http://www.exoticrainforest.com/Build your own tropical rainforest.html
PhotoPro, I got lucky and moved to the Pacific Northwest and zone 8. Perfect for my Japanese maples, plus Rhoddies, Azaleas, and alot of other cool plants. I am retired from my 20 year job as a public servant working for local county government. Now I spend every day in my small nursery. 3 greenhouses and one shade area. I guess I am sort of a hermit, I hate to go to town. We were lucky enough to purchase 13 acres on the Eastfork of the Lewis River in LaCenter, Washington. My husband found the land in 1982 only two years after Mt. St. Helens blew her top - we are about 50 miles away. I still find ash in the moss. Anyway, land was relatively inexpensive back then. I do know one thing that I need this much land to be happy. When we moved here I planted a row of fir, spruce, cedar, and sequoia trees, inter-mixed incase one species got a blight or insect problem. So know my trees are 25 feet tall and they form a living wall around two sides of our property. The other two sides are 1- the river and low lands where no one can build, now owned by the county as a wildlife reserve and the other in forest. We were lucky that this was untouched land, no buildings, only evidence of humans was barbed wire for livestock. Sorry to run on so much. I guess I wanted to tell you that one of my life time wishes is to write. Maybe some day. Take care. Sam
Don't wait! Write! I never had any training but managed to publish 300 plus articles in a bunch of magazine titles. So start now! If you know how to do something others would enjoy learning about, put it in an article and submit it to all the magazines you can find. You never know what might happen. And you are lucky! If it weren't for my artificial rain forest I think I'd go nuts! I hate snow!!
