Carol Reese – How does your garden glow? Using light in your garden

BIO:
Carol Reese feels that formal credentials can be boring (or even discrediting!) but admits to being a retired Extension Horticulture Specialist with the University of Tennessee for 27 years. Yes, she has degrees in Horticulture from Mississippi State, and could have even added a Ph.D. if she “had ever written that damn dissertation”. While there, she taught classes in Plant Materials, and co-taught Landscape Design for non-LA majors alongside a “real” landscape architect, her dear friend Ginny Fletcher – to classes who must have been confused by being taught by one woman with a British accent and another woman who was a fifth generation Mississippian.

These academic experiences were valuable but Carol will say that her most valuable insights can be attributed to being raised on a farm by generations of plant nuts, including a grandfather who dynamited his garden spot each spring to “break up his hard pan”. Likewise, her very personal appreciation of natural lore is at least partially a result of her observations during near daily rambles through wild areas near her home with her motley collection of mutts, also known as the strong-willed breed of “Amalgamations.”

Carol has been a newspaper garden columnist, the Q&A columnist for Horticulture magazine “back in the day”, and the horticulture editor for Tennessee Gardening, co-authored the UT Extension Master Gardener Handbook, writes freelance for other magazines, and lectures around the nation. She is working on a book she hopes will help her figure out how she saved enough brain cells from her party years to cobble together a rewarding career that eventually enabled her to build a secluded haven for homeless dogs and their human friend.