Author Bio
From an outdoor, country childhood, shared with an older brother, a younger brother, and innumerable pets, my life has come full circle. It began with a love of native flora and fauna, which became the subjects of my first writing. This early interest in plants and animals and the desire to commit my encounters with them to paper have been a consistent thread throughout a long, rather "checkered" career.
My first "book", entitled A Tale of Four Polliwogs, was written when I was in second grade. For the next few years, stories lavishly illustrated in color flowed from my pen and paint box. But changing schools nipped a literary career in the bud. My new teachers discovered that, while nothing inhibited my writing, my spelling was unacceptably bizarre and I had considerable difficulty reading.
This set back pointed me in a new direction. The spoken word. As I knew of no profession that involved plants, animals, and the out-of-doors, I wound up studying theater, and after a brief fling with acting, became a scene designer. Meanwhile, I continued to write stories, but writing did not translate into money. Nor, for that matter, did designing scenery in stock companies, so I became a teacher and for 20 years taught drama and designed sets for student productions.
During this period, I married an Englishman, and we settled down in Connecticut on eight acres of overgrown pasture and woodland. I taught during the academic year and played outside during the summer, whacking down brush and planting, planting, planting. In short, I began gardening. And so my life unfolded and with it, the garden. I continued to enjoy teaching and designing during the academic year, but I had never gotten writing out of my system.
So one year, I gave up my teaching job and began to write the great American novel. Like most novels by first time novelists, it was never published. Nor was the second or third. Finally, my husband said, "Why don't you quit trying to write novels and write about the garden instead?" Thus, began the last quarter of a century.