Welcome To My Faculty Page...

This spring semester concludes my 29th year as professor and program head of horticulture at Tidewater Community College. My fascination with the plant world began way back on a small farm in rural eastern North Carolina. As a child, exploring the gardens and forests around the farm were my daily adventures. Later at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and NC State, my interests turned to botany and horticulture, and years later I continued my studies at Virginia Tech. After graduation from college, I worked in commercial greenhouses before two years teaching high school in Charlotte, North Carolina. After a year teaching at DuPage Horticultural School in West Chicago, I landed my first college teaching position, and moved from the corn fields of the Illinois to those of rural Chesapeake, Virginia.

Over the years, the program that was conceived on the edge of the Elizabeth River, and operated in a mobile unit and a homemade greenhouse, has grown. Just as the cornfields were replaced, so were those meager beginnings, with new classrooms and greenhouses in 1995. The cornfields that surrounded the tiny campus on Cedar Road are long gone, but the program that grew from a small seed, planted here over thirty years ago, continues to grow.