Colleen Plimpton

Always a gardener and a scribbler, as I segued from my first career (clinical social worker), I decided to professionalize both avocations. I took classes in gardening at the New York Botanical Garden and in writing from author Linda Chiara. I practiced, worked hard, won a contest or two, and became a garden coach and lecturer at about the same time my writing began to sell. Numerous magazine articles later, I began penning (and still do) a weekly gardening column for the Danbury (CT) News-Times, a Hearst Media Group newspaper.

A Woodstock attendee (my picture was in Newsweek magazine at the time), my next publication was a chapter in Woodstock Revisited, an Adams Media book issued in 2009. As part of the festivities I was interviewed on PBS, and appeared on Good Morning America, dressed in hippie garb,and reliving the good old days. (How can it be possible 41 years have passed?)

My first solo book, Mentors in the Garden of Life, is this year's output. A compilation of gardening and life stories from my almost 60 years of tilling the soil, Mentors focuses on the lessons learned from others in the garden. Each chapter profiles an herb, flower, tree, vegetable or creature who has taught me something. At times funny, poignant and wistful, but always memorable, the stories in Mentors in the Garden of Life ask us to honor those who have shared of themselves, in the garden as well as in life.