Mentors in the Garden of Life - Softcover

Colleen Plimpton trained at the New York Botanical Garden where she now teaches classes in composting. She tends an acre of award-winning ornamental gardens in Connecticut where she teaches composting, composition, color and other elements of gardening. She maintains an active schedule of lecturing at flower shows, garden clubs and libraries.
 
A member of the Garden Writers of America, Colleen writes an award-winning garden column for the Hearst Connecticut Media Group and she is currently working on a new book.

The memories read like heart-warming short stories, the characters real enough to be those in your life. ...it's easy to imagine being the teen in hand-me-down denim peering at a bumpy white cauliflower in Uncle Frank's garden. And to appreciate how morning glories made friends for life. -- Kathy Huber, Houston Chronicle/San Antonio Express-News

Mentors is different from any gardening book I have read. The pages are filled with people who coloured Colleen's life with the love of gardening... This is an exceptional book. If you read it, you will remember. More importantly, you will mentor. --Dan Clost, book reviewer, Quinte West EMC, Ontario, Canada

Colleen has written an autobiography of herself as a social worker, a gardener, a friend, a daughter-mother-wife, a mentor, and someone you feel you have known for years... Buy it for yourself and someone else who loves plants as much as we who see our friends and families in the faces of our flowers.-- Molly Day, blog, All the Dirt on Gardening

Mentors is homage to the gardeners who have made an impression on the author over the years. In another sense, it's a deeply personal memoir about the intertwined lessons of life and gardening. On a third level, it's a snapshot of bygone America. -- Will Rowlands, Connecticut Gardener

In her memoir Mentors in the Garden of Life, Colleen Plimpton traces her development as a person and a gardener to a childhood spent on a farm in upstate New York . The countryside surrounding Rochester provides the setting in which we meet stern grandparents, a loving great aunt, and a young uncle, whose premature death made a deep impression upon his niece. Thus, Colleen learned early the importance of realizing life while we live it, the message of Thornton Wilder s play Our Town, and she became a keen observer of everything around her. What attracted her attention most were the plants, wild and cultivated, and she has been paying attention to them ever since. Learning lessons along the way from both plants and people, she writes about these encounters with touching affection. --Sydney Eddison, Gardening for a Lifetime; How to Garden Wiser as You Grow Older

My taste in gardening books normally runs to reference works like those from Michael Dirr or The American Horticultural Society. But this one from Colleen Plimpton may just change my reading habits. I found myself positively captured by her descriptions of family life in rural upstate New York . "Go outside to play" had an entirely different meaning to me, a city mouse. Yet Colleen's word pictures and descriptions put me precisely in the same places she described: climbing trees, finding cow bones, and fishing in the local creek. After reading this book I now feel that I've somehow had the experience of growing up on a farm. This is a heartwarming and pleasurable read that you'll find yourself going back to for the lessons it subtly and gently conveys. Colleen's clear writing style and sense of peace are strong magnets for anyone who enjoys digging in the dirt. --Lorraine Ballato, garden writer and author of Successful Self-Watering Containers