One of the questions just about everyone who visits our nursery asks me (Steve) is, "How did you get started in all of this?"
Truth is, being a shy and awkward child had a lot to do with it. As a kid, I was about a foot taller than everyone else in my kindergarten class photo. Throughout elementary school, I stood out because I was tall, but also because I was just a natural-born "dork"--no real talent for or interest in sports, not much of a hunter/fisherman (in rural Appalachia, were almost every guy was), and more interested in learning than playing. To best honest, I still don't know if I was born as something of a loner, or if it was just the result of years of difficultly making friends. Either way, I found myself providing my own entertainment for much of my childhood, and that almost always meant being outdoors when the weather would allow it.
On rainy days or when the thermometer rose high enough in our corner of the South to pretty much bring all activity to a halt, I would sprawl out on the floor with my nose in an encyclopedia. (For those of you a bit younger than I, encyclopedias were how we learned obscure facts and researched things in the pre-internet world!)
Another major influence on my childhood interest in science was growing up around farms.
My own family raised Angus beef cattle, and my extended family kept horses, pigs, chickens and more and raised two or more enormous vegetable gardens every summer. In addition, my paternal grandparents lived on the site where a local lady had run a thriving nursery business some hundred years before, leaving the property littered with uncommon plants, trees, and vines that I found fascinating. And of course, the ultimate motivation: when we worked around the barns, baled hay, or worked in the garden, there were always "creepy-crawlies"--snakes, spiders, and insects that made my family members run and scream. I was only too happy to capture and study these objects of horror, and the fact that my sisters and brother and cousins were terrified of them only added to their attraction in my mind!
At something like six or seven years old, I went grocery shopping with my mom at the local Winn Dixie store, where she found and purchased a Venus Flytrap, thinking it would make a good subject for me to study. I'd grown up with grandparents who were great gardeners, as well as my own mom and dad, and I enjoyed the challenge of caring for the seemingly exotic Flytrap. Soon, I learned that it was in fact native almost exclusively to my home state of North Carolina, occurring solely in the confines of an ancient depression created by a meteor strike in prehistoric times and roughly defining the city of Wilmington, NC and extending just over the line into the South Carolina coast. One day of capturing hapless insects to feed my new prized possession was enough to get me hooked, and soon I was reading everything I could find about carnivorous plants and their biology. In those days, the Venus Flytrap we bought and all of the pitcher plants and other carnivores available from our local greenhouse were surely raped from the wild, before much-needed legislation made such things a serious crime. Had we known, we wouldn't have bought them, but as it was, I collected several fascinating species and soon had a bog in the backyard, flush with insect-munching botanical wonders.
About this same time, my dad took me along on a fateful trip to a local second-hand store, where he allowed me to choose several issues from a vast stack of ancient National Geographic magazines. Published in the early 1950s mostly, those magazines flung wide the door to a world far beyond my own experience and lit a passion in me for plants and animals that still burns bright today. Two issues in particular captured my imagination, one on the vast variety of orchids and the fervor around collecting them, and the other about the native Nepenthes (tropical Pitcher Plants) of the island of Borneo.
All this fascination with life and "underdog" species led to eight years of training in biology (over the span of twelve), and a lifelong hobby of growing exotic and unusual plants. By the way, I'm also known as the local "snake guy"--the person you call when you have a rattlesnake or Copperhead on your property and need advice. I often relocate unwanted snakes for local folks, for the safety of both parties involved. So, my science interests have remained diverse over the years!
The takeaway, if there is one, might be this: Parents, encourage your children's interests! Indulge their pursuits, whether or not they appear to have any potential economic benefit, and don't be afraid to let your children step to the beat of a different drummer. In doing so, you prepare them for a lifetime of pursuing their passions. And after all, isn't that what "success" really looks like?
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