BASED IN RALEIGH, N.C., plant breeder and explorer Tony Avent founded Plant Delights Nursery, a mail-order retailer specializing in rare and unusual perennials, in 1986. At the same time, he established Juniper Level Botanic Garden with the goal of supporting genetic diversity and the sharing of plants and information.
Through his speaking engagements and writing as well as at the nursery and garden, Tony continues to promote gardening as a path toward plant conservation—and, of course, a source of great fun.
SCOTT BEUERLEIN: You own and run the premier mail-order nursery in the country, you’re building a botanical garden, you breed plants, travel the world collecting plants, you speak, you write—how do you find the time?
TONY AVENT: Well, sleep is greatly overrated! Years ago I came up with my theory of time management. Every week you actually have four forty-hour weeks. It’s what you decide to do with those four forty-hour weeks. The first 40 are for your job. Then, 40 for sleep. Then you’ve still got two forty-hour weeks.
“WE NEED EVERY SINGLE GARDEN TO CONSERVE RARE PLANTS. THAT’S HOW WE SAVE THESE PLANTS.”
If you look at it from that perspective, you have a lot more time than you think. So it’s all about how you approach time and how you view that. A lot of people simply just waste time. Other people simply aren’t efficient. So as our business and everything grew, I’ve had to become more and more efficient.
I’m also a serial organizer. I’m OCD and it’s all about not having everything obsessively organized. I’m very blessed. I’ve got really bad ADHD and OCD. So the ADHD means I can do 100 things at once. The OCD means I have to finish them all!
I’ll have 25 to 30 tabs open on my browser at any one time. It’s a fascinating thing for others who aren’t wired like that to watch. I’m writing a blog and I’m writing about a fern and I want to know where the fern comes from. So I’ll open another tab to see where it’s from and they’ll note that there’s a taxonomic issue with it so then I’ll go in the garden
