EDITOR'S ARMCHAIR: Introduction and New Article Format
- 5 days ago
- 9 min read
By Tony Gurnoe, for Let's Talk Plants August 2026
Introduction and New Article Format
A couple of months ago I had the pleasure of giving my first presentation to the San Diego Horticultural Society (SDHS). Some in the audience were already familiar with my horticultural history but I was also afforded the opportunity to meet many new fellow gardeners. This is one of the beautiful and valuable aspects of our gatherings - building community with like minded plant people. The success and bountiful attendance of that presentation have encouraged me to create a new monthly column through which I'll share bits of the incredibly diverse and interconnected world of professional horticulture, hopefully to inspire and engage fellow gardeners of all varieties.
Future articles will cover an array of topics more pertinent to horticultural pursuits but for now I'll take this opportunity to share a bit of my background and the lead up to me serving as both Program Coordinator and Newsletter Editor for SDHS. Unlike many of our talented members, I did not grow up in a gardening household. I did, however, grow up very interested in food, which ultimately provided me with a back door into horticulture.
Being raised in a vegetarian home meant insufficient options when eating out and primarily meals cooked at home. Fortunately my father was quite capable in the kitchen but with raising six children as a single parent, also extremely busy. Toward the end of my teenage years the kitchen dynamic shifted and I became the primary cook for our home. Preparing and sharing food remains a labor of love in my life, but there was a problem. Cooking vegetarian meals from scratch meant an abundance of scraps, peels, seeds, and ends. What was I supposed to do with all this stuff?! Surely no portion of these gifts from the earth were destined to suffocate in landfills! With a bit of outside influence and independent study, the environmentalist and frugal chef in me found a lasting union in the form of compost.
Many gardeners encounter compost as a tool to aide their horticultural ambitions but for me it was the foundational element connecting food for my loved ones with the broader world. Growing and sharing food plants became an obsession for me.
While gardening remained about edibility for many subsequent years, things surged in scale and significance when I took advantage of being underemployed during the Great Recession and used my access to a small pool of state money to sign up for horticulture classes at MiraCosta College. My ambition at that time was simply to become a better backyard vegetable gardener, but the horticultural world had bigger plans for me than I could have fathomed. My professors immediately impressed upon me, as I had them, that I have a natural aptitude for understanding plant culture and science. Evidently this was also apparent to people beyond my classrooms because shortly thereafter I was awarded scholarships, was earnestly in pursuit of a degree in horticulture, and never substantially looked back at my first career in construction.
The San Diego Horticultural Society's scholarship was the first among those awards, and the most notable event that made me think there may be something to all this time I was spending fiddling with plants. Quickening the pace of this story a bit, I would spend the next handful of years establishing and managing my own radically sustainable and admittedly eccentric farm in Fallbrook. Aside from having a community supported agriculture subscription program and selling at the farmer's market, the hobbyist chef in me also focused on supplying direct to local restaurants, allowing me to collaborate with chefs who had fed U.S. presidents, been on the Food Network, and cooked for the Kentucky Derby. It was a beautiful if somewhat reckless and short-lived venture as I lost the lease to that land before the end of 2015.
Something I failed to mention was my brief stint as a staff gardener at the San Diego Botanic Garden (SDBG). That institution would soon become my second home although at that moment I felt dejected and lost without my farm. Certainly I didn't wish to go from living my dream to just taking whatever job came my way next, so I spent much of 2016 backpacking through the wilderness, unwittingly devotional in my study of the ecology and taxonomy of native plants throughout the western U.S. A stylistic harbinger for my future as a native plant expert. Those travels took me far enough afield to make me unsure I would ever return to San Diego, but my dad's birthday was coming up and a month straight of cold rain trending into snow in Oregon prompted me to head home.
The original idea was something like a staycation - to savor the weather, visit friends, and of course stop in at the local botanical garden. That visit to the botanical garden would change my career and life forever as I was invited to an upcoming retirement party for my former supervisor. Throughout that event people insistently asked me if I was going to apply for her position of Horticulture Manager. They seemed insane to me - what did I know about caring for the approximately 5,000 taxa of plants in that living scientific collection? Still, the encouragement was pervasive and I have a proven tendency toward throwing myself into intimidating situations without much concern. After being hired as the institution's second ever Horticulture Manager, I spent a whole four months in that position before being promoted to Director of Horticulture - one of the youngest in such a role at any botanical garden across the country.
As this story comes nearer to present time I suspect it will be less novel for some readers so I'll write more summarily while stating that I am happy to share more to meet any interest. My legacy as Director of Horticulture at that institution remains visible in two prominent features. The first being their Dickinson Family Educational Conservatory. This incredibly unique facility allowed me to take an ambitious dream expressed by SDBG president-emeritus Julian Duval and stretch every bit of my ability to turn it into a planted reality. You really need to see that facility to understand that we did things with plants that no other horticulturist had ever accomplished, despite dubious cautions of failure from many prominent peers. Briefly, this meant leveraging the biology of our subject plants to create a three dimensional planted space that feels both organic and other worldly while blurring the perception of indoors versus out.
While I spent much of those days investing my personal capabilities and creativity into that nearly six million dollar project, we also managed to develop a talented and eager team of staff and volunteers who were caring for the existing garden at a professional caliber the institution had never previously seen. As the completion of the conservatory neared, I began to train others and hand off care of that space. I also wondered what to do with myself, wary of getting in the way of the clear growth of the people and plants who reported to me.
As (bad) luck would have it, the public debut of that conservatory exactly coincided with the initial wave of COVID-19 lock downs and the entire future of SDBG was thrown into question. Timing is interesting because the first proposal I ever wrote was also approved early in 2020. That confluence of events would send me down a fork in the road that I couldn't have anticipated in the before time. Suddenly I had a complete, state-of-the-art conservatory and money for the first restoration project ever funded by the City of Encinitas, but remote-only staff and no volunteers. As we struggled through a period of desperately staving off plant deaths and the loss of 50 years of community investment in that garden, it also forced reconsideration of the institution's identity and again prompted me to wonder, "Now what?" regarding my own path forward.
Plants and plant people are characteristically resilient so before the end of 2020 I had handed off day to day care of the garden to the team who once reported to me, while I seized an opportunity to create a new Science and Conservation department as the inaugural Director of Conservation Horticulture. The garden's leadership gave me that chance on the conditions that I could start with one employee and would need to make the program self-funded within two years. Sometimes it's beneficial to be so inexperienced as to be unaware of the seeming impossibility of a task. I started all of this just to grow healthy food for my family and still had no college degree - who was I to be leading a scientific conservation program for a public institution? Apparently the right person for the moment because based on my leadership, field botany skills, and story telling abilities, we immediately secured more than a million dollars in funding and the program ballooned to a staff rivaling the size of my old horticulture team, including PhD level experts in plant sciences. That period contained some of my favorite professional moments, from being awarded hundreds of thousands of dollars for a federal conservation contract based on the first grant proposal I ever wrote to being the first person to cultivate some of our region's rarest and most threatened native species.
I found myself at my desk more than I wanted, though, and when regular garden volunteers who I had known for years would happen across me scrambling from one meeting to another remarked, "Oh, you still work here?!" It hurt my heart. Propagation and the early stages of growth are my favorite moments and it turns out that is equally true regarding institutional growth. SDBG's Science and Conservation program was staffed up, funded for years to come, we had built out an entirely new research nursery, laboratory, and seed bank, and that all meant it was time for me to move on to the next growth venture.
A professor I had long collaborated with asked for my help building out and supporting the field research projects for San Diego State University's evolutionary ecology, soil ecology, and conservation ecology labs. Most of that story will need to be reserved for another article (you can read a bit about that work in the July/August 2025 edition of California Gardens magazine) but I simultaneously founded a company focused on native tree and plant care which operates to this day. Sometimes I find it difficult to succinctly explain my involvement with horticulture and I suspect you'll now understand why I tell people, "Think of anything to do with plants and I have done it professionally," - across eight U.S. states, in collaboration with dozens of research institutions, and impacting practices in several countries from as near as Mexico to as far as Australia.
Throughout the nearly two decades I have devoted to horticulture, people know or remember me from varying epochs, so to speak. Some will tell me, "I remember you from that stinky flower!" As the corpse flower, Amorphophallus titanum, was the impetus for my first front-page newspaper feature. Others consider me an authority on all things oak trees. Some people still pine over the quality and unique varieties of food I've provided. Whatever version, I am extremely grateful for the constant welcoming embrace provided by the horticultural community and consider it a great honor to give back what I can to this wonderful organization full of people who believed in my horticultural potential even before I did and who have supported me regardless of whatever crazy thing I get into. Thank you for everything including taking the time to read my story!
