When I was 13 I began gardening as a summer job on an antique farm in Temple NH, tending ancient peonies and a luscious raspberry patch.  One summer during highschool I worked at Webber's Dublin Nursery where I was introduced to Gray's Manual of Botany and the wonders of roadside seed collecting through Carl Webber's stories.  After a year of studying Horticulture and Agriculture in the midwest ('95) I left my university which wasn't the best fit for me as they were basically streaming everyone into golf course maintenance programs or to managing very large commercial farms, no talk of ecology, natives or scale variables; it kind of blew my mind after attending a NOFA summer conference at Hampshire College in Western Massachusetts that everyone in education wouldn't be thinking about these things.