CAROL REESE recently retired from her career as an Extension Horticulture Specialist based at the University of Tennessee’s West Tennessee AgResearch and Education Center. She is a popular writer and speaker, mixing humor with solid gardening information. She lives outside of Jackson, Tenn., with her beloved rescue dogs.
SCOTT BEUERLEIN: How and when were you first captured by horticulture’s gravity?
CAROL REESE: My love for the green world began on our farm and the neighbors’ farms that surrounded us in rural Mississippi. When I was still a wee girl, my mama would take me to the fields and the woods, turn me ’round and ’round and say, “Now which way is home? As soon as I know you can find your way home, I’ll turn you loose to roam the farm.”
And she did, and I did, on horseback once I got Diamond for my tenth birthday. That mare loved exploring as much as I did, since we often stopped to let her munch on choice bits—osage orange, mulberries or tender clovers. Diamond and I would often be gone most of the day, trying to find where creeks began and the like. Sometimes I rode home with plant “treasures” in my pocket to show my mother. (By the way, dead-ripe persimmons don’t arrive well when stashed in jacket pockets and transported on a galloping horse!)
We grew crops for silage and hay to feed the dairy herd, and a one-acre vegetable garden for the humans, along with several fruit trees. I had a grandfather who showed me where to find buckeyes, and with his pocketknife peeled cold sweet turnips for me as we stood in the fall garden. That dairy farm became an orchard in the
