Above is a close-up of yellow wood violet (Viola glabella).

I was raised in the “Pennsylvania Dutch Country” of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, surrounded by German-speaking Amish and Mennonite communities.  My undergraduate degree is in horticulture from Pennsylvania State University.  Between my junior and senior years at Penn State, I participated in the Summer Program at Longwood Gardens just west of Philadelphia—one of the world’s top botanic gardens and the former estate of Pierre Samuel DuPont.  After getting my B.S., I spent three years in western Europe—Sweden, France, Germany, and Switzerland—participating in self-designed internships as a horticulturist and landscape designer for municipal parks departments, before returning to the U.S. to pursue a masters degree in forest ecology at Oregon State University.

After graduate school, I worked briefly as a horticulturist for Portland (Oregon) Parks Bureau and then resumed my studies in horticulture as a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  Before completing the degree, however, homesickness drew me back to Oregon, where I settled in 1983 in Eugene.  I taught part-time at Lane Community College for 20 years—first in the two-year landscape program and later in the continuing education program where I offered both horticulture classes and field classes in natural history.  Simultaneously, I operated a small business as a consulting horticulturist and landscape designer, which I eventually closed in 2012.

In 2005, I began teaching for the University of Oregon’s Department of Landscape Architecture (see that page of this website) where I taught until June of 2023 when I retired.  From 2004 to 2014, I also operated a second small business called OUT-OF-DOORS that offered field classes in natural history throughout the West (see that page of this website).  And since 2006, I organize and host the Nordic Film Series every academic term at the University of Oregon, under the aegis of the university’s Department of Landscape Architecture.

(For a far more detailed chronology, see the attachment below.)

(This page updated 07 April 2024)