ALLEN BUSH: A gardening joyride

ALLEN BUSH is a plantsman who sold rare and unusual perennials through his own nursery, Holbrook Farm, before joining Jelitto Perennial Seeds, a Germany-based company that provides seed to nurseries, seed retailers and gardeners.

- SCOTT BEUERLEIN

Allen expanded Jelitto's business in North America and traveled in search of interesting plants to add to the company's lineup. Now retired, he gardens on two Kentucky properties and writes regularly for GardenRant.com.

SCOTT BEUERLEIN: When did you become interested in horticulture and what was your training?

ALLEN BUSH: I spent my childhood in the woods, at the end of our street, in suburban Louisville. I didn't garden when I was growing up. However, in the first grade, I sowed bush beans in a milk carton. Watching little sprouts push through the soil was, and still is, magical whenever I sow seeds.

I planted my first garden in college. It was a fundamental rite of passage for any early-1970s hippie wannabe. My mentor was a tobacco farmer named Elsie Lowery in rural Jessamine County outside of Lexington. He offered me a space next to his tobacco field. I went through a pile of Organic Gardening magazines the winter before. I imagined an orderly square plot, 20 feet by 20 feet. Elsie plowed my first garden space adjacent to his tobacco field in late April. It was an unruly and peculiar looking garden-one row, 400 feet long.

I began trying to learn wildflowers, trees and shrubs the same year, 1972. I didn't know the difference between an oak and a maple. I was a sociology undergraduate at the University of Kentucky. I have never forgotten watching the fat buds on a buckeye unfurl in early spring along the Palisades of the Kentucky River.