Getting to know the AAS Judges, Part 1 - All-America Selections

Let’s Get to Know the AAS Judges!

The AAS Judges are horticulture experts who come to us from varied paths.

We have asked our judges a number of questions to allow you, the passionate gardener who loves using AAS Winners, to learn more about the people behind the scores.

John Porter

Question #1: Tell us about your first experience or exposure to gardening:

My family always had a huge vegetable garden – I can remember one year we canned hundreds of cans of food. But personally, one of my favorite things to do as a young kid was hour-upon-hour of looking through all those catalogs that came in the mail in the winter. I’d plan out my dream garden – even though I usually only ended up with that 5 cent pack of mixed seeds for kids. ~John Porter
My mother always liked to garden and that was probably my first exposure. She always had plants around the house and inside as well. She got a job working at Bordine’s Better Bloom as a cashier. This led me to getting a summer job there and my first exposure to commercial horticulture. My first job was to squeegee the floor in the morning after everything got watered! ~Dr. Mark Yelanich
My grandmother grew a wide variety of fruits and berries for her family and to sell on their dairy farm. She also loved and planted many perennials and shrubs around their home. My father was an early horticulturist who grew a wide variety of cut flowers and bedding plants for retail sales in his flower shop and he also wholesaled them across our province. ~Brian Minter
Like many, my first experience was working in the family vegetable garden – pulling weeds! Yikes -not much fun. Then came shelling peas and digging potatoes. However, my best experience was when my mom got me a job between my Freshman and Sophomore years in college at a local garden center. SOLD! ~Pam Bennett
I was raised on a farm. I cannot remember a time that we did not have both a flower and vegetable garden. My most memorable garden moment is, when I was very young, I was at my grandmother’s house spending the afternoon, I could not tell time but had a sense of time. I made the mistake of asking her how many Lassie shows are two hours? She explained to me she had a better way to tell time. In her garden was a very long row of Shasta Daisies that needed cut back, she handed me a pair of clippers and said, this will take you about two hours. ~Ryan L Doughty
Cooking and gardening go hand in hand in my family. My mother is an awesome cook, and she always enjoyed planting vegetables and herbs to use in her cooking. I have a vivid memory of helping my mother weed one of her beds in her backyard and I would have to say that that is one of my first experiences with gardening. ~Rose Oberholtzer

Question #2: Tell us how your horticulture career came to be:

I have been working in the horticulture industry since I was 15 years old. My career actually started when I got the job at the Dallas Arboretum working with Jimmy Turner as his research assistant. The knowledge I gained during that time period was invaluable! The Dallas Arboretum is where I first learned about AAS as well 🙂 ~Denise Mullins
I always loved gardening and have been in the garden since I was 5, helping my grandmother and parents. I worked a number of jobs before going back to school for an AS degree in Floriculture. I got a job at a nursery for a year then I started work for Allegheny County Parks where I stayed for 27+ years as the greenhouse grower and horticulturist. I began teaching gardening classes, started speaking to groups and writing. ~Denise Schreiber
At 16 I worked as a breeder assistant in seed trials and was hooked.~Patty Buskirk
My mom had a greenhouse and sold plants wholesale. When I was in high school and college (UGA) I worked at a local garden center and decided to major in horticulture. ~Shelley Prescott
Horticulture has been a big part of my upbringing with many family members and friends proudly growing and tending to their gardens. I can remember my grandma, mom, and aunts excitedly going to work at a local greenhouse each summer. My career did not start until college when I spent my first summer managing vegetable trials for Pure Line Seeds, Inc. which later turned into a full-time job in marketing and product development. ~Kirsten DeLong
In grad school, I found that I loved working in the greenhouse. ~Courtney Buckley
I was an avid “hobbyist” for many years and finally made the leap to make horticulture a career! I quit my job to go back to grad school to study horticulture and it was the greatest decision I have ever made! ~Brett Owens
Fresh out of high school, looking for a summer job before starting college. I had a friend that worked at this “big vegetable farm” nearby. I spent the next 3 summers working 7 days a week picking peppers, zucchini, eggplant, and cabbage, and it included planting these things called “plugs” ….over the years, the plugs became the focus of the company, and growing fresh market vegetables went away. C. Raker & Sons (now Raker-Roberta’s) was one of the first major producers of ornamental plugs, and I have been involved in it since the early ’80s. ~Jenny Kuhn

Question #3: Tell us about your first job in horticulture:

My first job was a summer internship at the Paine Arboretum in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. I learned a lot about practical horticulture, which complemented all the college horticulture courses I was taking at the time. It was hard work but I had a lot of fun too. My favorite parts were honing my pruning skills and discovering so many amazing plants that I only knew from a book.~Richard Hawke
Working at Spring Grove Cemetery and Arboretum in Cincinnati, Ohio. ~James E. Klett
The Plant Shed in Euless, Texas, a small chain of independent garden centers. ~David Czarnecki
My first job in Horticulture was at a hydroponic greenhouse. It specialized in organic herbs, processed them, and sold them in the little packages you see in the grocery store. They also grew hanging baskets for the local hardware stores. ~Jessica Cloninger
My husband (George Park) and I worked on a seed production farm in Guatemala in the late 1970s. On February 4, 1976, at 3 am, a major earthquake hit the whole country – 28,000 deaths. Our house pitched and shook but did not fall in on us, so we are alive to tell the story. Afterward, not only did we continue working on the farm but we pitched in with relief work in our village. Such an experience changes the way you look at everything after that. ~Barbara Park
I was a field pollinator for Petoseed in Woodland, CA the summer of 1978. I pollinated cucumber, squash, pumpkin, eggplant. I deseeded tomato selections by hand for Jack Hanna. I learned to drive a stick shift on this job in an ancient Ford Pinto that you could see through the floorboards onto the road. This was necessary to get to the squash isolation fields. Trial by fire! Interesting that this was my start in the industry, but also where I ended up and retired from in 2013. ~Teresa Bunn
I am a fourth-generation vegetable farmer. My first job where I was paid a wage (and not considered “free” family labor) was weeding onions on the family farm. One of the most enduring memories of hard labor was weeding on my hands and knees, in the heat and after completing about 400′ of the rows, was standing up and seeing another 1600′. I knew I was in for a long day. 🙁 ~Dennis Ferlito
My first job in horticulture was working at the Cornell University NYS Agricultural Experiment Station while I was in high school. I worked as an assistant in a vegetable pathology lab where I helped with their field and greenhouse research trials. A few of the projects were studying Black Rot in Cabbage and Phytophthora in Peppers. It was here that I discovered my love of growing vegetables, pathogen ID, and collecting trial data.~Kristen Noble
In 1998, I began a job as a cashier in a home & garden showplace called Binding Stevens which began in 1906 as a seed & feed store. I was almost instantly enamored with plants & worked with people I still care about today, inside & outside of the profession. ~Kelley Dunn
I started as a Grower at Groff’s Plant Farm, Kirkwood, PA. ~Sarah Barbour
I was a technician as an undergraduate at the University of Connecticut for Richard Ashley, the state vegetable specialist. At the time he had been a judge for AAS for many years. As his assistant in 1992, I grew to love the science behind growing vegetables. ~Robert Durgy