New York Botanical Garden

Mm-hmm.

But first I wanna hear from you about your involvement with gardening, and I looked at your business website, starflower-gardens.com, and I was struck by the array of great gardens you've worked at or been associated with, not only my own alma mater, the New York Botanical Garden, but also Wave Hill, that fabulous public garden in the Bronx, Stone Crop, which is a wonderful former estate in Duchess County, New York, Locust Grove, a historic Hudson River estate with a complex of gardens, and Longview, an extraordinary house and garden landscape in New Orleans.

That's quite a resume.

I've been really lucky to work at all those gardens.

And so once I graduated, I sort of understood that I wanted to be working in a really hands-on way, but it was really great to have the opportunity to be at all these different places and work with so many great gardeners and just see that there were many, many different approaches to gardening.

Eventually, I started my own business, and yeah, I'm just really grateful for all those work opportunities and just the breadth of exposure to gardens that I had, um, during that time period when I was working as an early career gardener.

I think one of the great things about gardening as a profession is that if you're enthusiastic and dedicated, I didn't have any formal background in gardening until I went to the New York Botanical Garden.

Yeah.

Small was critical of drainage, but rarely entered the realm of the political debates on the future of the Everglades.

His contributions were scientific as the advisor to Royal Palm State Park, the author of 450 articles and books, and the collector of 60,000 specimens for the New York Botanical Garden.

Small's scientific writings and his book From Eden to Sahara played a role in Ernest Coe's efforts to obtain federal designation of an Everglades National Park.

As Willem explains, Small, quote, "Neither saw the Everglades as a resource that needed to be exploited efficiently, nor as a refuge for Native Americans, but instead viewed the region as a unique biological landscape and scientific resource that needed to be studied, cataloged, and analyzed, a natural history museum that should be protected for its scientific educational value," end quote.

I think, but for me, the, um, the light bulb moment, first of all, I, I took up coach training kind of as a, I don't quite wanna say a hobby, but I thought it would accent my own knowledge.

I actually had gone to a school for three years at the New York Botanical Gardens for landscape design.

It...

I'm a constant learner.

That worked out really well because I got the dance out of my system and really wanted to work, uh, join the team that was protecting this glorious, beautiful planet and all its creatures and wanted to get into conservation and sustainability and all of that.

Got lucky into a job as director of science development at the New York Botanical Garden and learned a whole lot in a couple of years working with ethnobotanists, sys-- uh, systematic botanists, uh, and, and all of their conservation projects throughout the world.

And while I really appreciate and respect basic science, I thought, "I want to work, uh, hands-on.

I want to work with a group that is applying science, that wor- that is working on applied science." And it all kinda happened perfectly well that I met the Rainforest Alliance and was brought in at that time and spent eighteen years on working on market-based conservation.