Ken Brown Finds
Gardening to be a Way of Life
If you have found your way to this page about Ken Brown, the author of this web site, then you probably want to know why you should bother taking gardening advice from this character. I've always been fascinated by green things that grow. Somehow this fascination led me to choose Horticulture as my university field of study and then led me down a long and interesting garden path that became my life.
Where Does It Happen?
I have lived and gardened in the area around Toronto Canada for most of my life and although it is located in the cool temperate section of Eastern North America, I have spent most of my professional life working with tropical and sub tropical plants. Early in my career I was given one of the best jobs that I could imagine. Toronto was building a huge new zoo and the animals were all to be housed, (as much as possible,) in natural settings that refelected their native habitat. This required extensive buildings filled with exotic plants and there I was, Ken Brown, the horticulturist charged with creating those settings.
A Life In Tropicals!
The next few years were spent accumulating as much knowledge as possible about the natural origins of any tropical plant species that was available in N. America and then seeing what was required to make them survive in a heated building in Toronto. We were not without our big and small failures but fortunately our successes were greater in number and the gardens at the Toronto Zoo became as worthy of a visit as the animals they were surrounding, (in my humble opinion.)
That accumulated expertise in
Indoor gardening
led to 20+ years of operating an interior landscaping firm and an even greater knowledge of how to keep houseplants alive, and with a little luck, actually flourishing. Incredibly when I went home from all of these horticultural happenings, I gardened outdoors as a hobby and as a way to feed a growing family.
Where Do My Gardens Travel To
Passing the Knowledge!
Produce that I knew the source and history of, was important to me and it seems
to have been a worthwhile venture. All five of my grown children, having spent years complaining about helping to weed the garden or pick and shell the peas, now have gardens of their own. That's why you will find gardening adventures and ideas from a variety of geographical locations. The children expect advice from me whether they live in central British Columbia, St John's Newfoundland or the south of England and you can follow all of those attempts to provide that advice on these pages.
Where Am I Now? My own current garden adventures take place within a mile or so of the N. shore of Lake Ontario and that puts me in
U.S.D.A Zone 5
or
Canadian Zone 6.
If you look on those zone maps you will see a tiny sliver of those zones that wraps itself tightly around the western half of the lake. If the wind is in the right direction, I'm in that tiny sliver.
My Non-Gardening Time!Because the zoo position was a somewhat high profile one, Ken Brown had the opportunity to write about it and to occasionally appear on the radio and television. I have continued to write about
speak about the many and varied aspects of gardening
over the years and that is now my life's joy and work. This web page is my latest endeavour as I try to spread the word that gardening, in its many forms, is a wonderful and therapeutic endeavour.
What's In It For You?
I hope that you can find some nuggets of wisdom or advice in these pages that will help you in your efforts to be a successful gardener. Whether you are growing an African Violet on your windowsill or two acres of vegetable garden, (as I did for many years,) you can still enjoy the benefits of
Dallying In The Dirt, which is the name Ken Brown uses for his free ezine. Hopefully you can learn from the knowledge I have acquired through my many years of accumulated mistakes and just enough successes, to keep me going.
You can search Ken Brown's entire site for answers to your other gardening mysteries. Enjoy!
return from Ken Brown to Gardening-Enjoyed home page
Where Does It Happen?