Last weeks article Mimi and I had made it Bainbridge Island north of Seattle. We visited 2 gardens on the first day of our vacation. We packed up and left our quiet house in the woods. This would be the day that Mimi has dreamed of for many years. Mimi started following and keeping up with a plantsman named Dan Hinkley. Dan is a horticulturist, a naturalist, a teacher and a steward of Heronswood Gardens and Windcliff gardens, at his home high on a bluff over looking the Peugeot Sound. Dans...

On July 16th Mimi and I found ourselves on a flight to Seattle. We use sky miles so we have to go to Atlanta to get anywhere. The flight time for the day was 6 or 7 hours, that’s a pretty big fly day. When we arrived we had rental car ready to ride. We had about 2 hours to get to the house we rented on Bainbridge Island, still in Washington state. By the time we crossed over on the ferry and demolished a pizza in the little town of Winslow where we would stay for 2 nights it was dark so we...

Back in 1991 I returned to Mississippi after a 3 year stint in the Caribbean. I was a peace corps volunteer on the island of Grenada. During that time I spent time on most of the islands in the eastern Caribbean conducting educational seminars for small scale farmers about growing non traditional crops. The agency that I worked for offered ideas to farmers who weren’t making it in the highly competitive world of bananas in that region. Together we developed varieties of papaya, Carambola...