Jean Starr
Jean Starr is a long-time gardener and award-winning writer whose first published article appeared in the American Horticultural Society’s magazine in 1992. The topic was how to keep a garden journal. Since then, Jean has spoken and written about a wide range of topics for a number of national and regional print and online publications. Today, her garden journal consists of detailed records of plant purchases and meticulously-labeled photos. Successes and failures are recorded in her blog, PetalTalk-jean.com.
Her garden is her laboratory—an average-sized residential lot surrounded by oaks and arborvitae, and frequented by deer, hawks, foxes, groundhogs and raccoons. Jean chooses each plant she puts in her garden for its unique beauty, and has grown everything from the rare to the commonplace in her Zone 6A garden—a Southern Magnolia, dozens of peonies, tropical ginger, and hundreds of unusual plants grown from seed. Her overall goal is to have color in the garden practically year-round, staging a colorful sequence that gives her something to look forward to at least seven months of the year.
Having started out in the late 1970s with houseplants before concentrating on gardening outdoors, Jean has recently rediscovered that aspect of gardening with orchids and bulbs from Africa. Every vacation she takes is planned around public gardens and retail and wholesale growing operations. Her plant obsession has blossomed through the years and she continues her quest for more knowledge, more time and more plants.
