I've been fascinated by the natural world my entire life. As evidenced by the theme of this website, I find it an endless source of creative inspiration. I was raised in a family of outdoor enthusiasts and spent the weekends and Summers of my youth exploring the forests around our A-frame weekend home, and camping & fishing in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado and Gulf Coast of Florida. When I moved to Southern California in the mid 1990's to begin my professional career in web design and marketing for the music and film industry, I was immediately taken by the beauty of the diverse landscape and the flora of the arid, sub-tropical and desert climates of the region that allowed for year-round outdoor gardening. In my spare time I began visiting every botanical garden I could find and joined many of the specialty gardening clubs where I learned everything I could about the botany and taxonomy of a wide variety of rare and unusual plant families that were able to be grown there.

The patio outside my small home in the coastal enclave of Venice, CA was soon transformed into a miniature botanical garden itself, with tropical orchids and bromeliads festooning the trees and tables filled with rare cactus and succulent plant oddities I acquired while attending the numerous plant shows & sales that were prevalent in the LA area. After the .com crash and tragic events of 2001, I found myself looking for a way to supplement my income, so I began selling divisions of my plants to local nurseries and even designing & installing landscapes for homes in Venice, West LA, Brentwood, and Pacific Palisades.

Moving to the less hospitable climate of Colorado in 2006 forced me to part with most of my extensive plant collection, but I did bring a number of my favorite varieties of small succulent plants and have continued propagating, hybridizing and growing from seed I produce via hand pollination and trading with other hobbyist growers around the world. In 2018, one of my Haworthia bayeri hyrids won the coveted "Heacock Award for Best Haworthia" at the Denver Cactus & Succulent Show sponosored by the Colorado Cactus & Succulent Society at The Denver Botanic Gardens.

Though very different from Southern California, having easy access the vast wilderness areas of Colorado has permitted me to continue persuing my love of the outdoors and provided the opportunity to explore and photograph the awe-inspiring landscape and incredible variety of unusual plant life in the sub-alpine forests and high altitude tundra environments of the Rocky Mountains. I have also developed a line of selectively bred Zinnia annual flower varieties that are offered each Spring at a local nursery near my home in Longmont, CO.

Below are galleries showing some photos of my ongoing plant breeding work as well as some in-situ photos of native Colorado orchids (yes, orchids grow in Colorado!) and high altitude tundra widlflowers.

Haworthia and Gasteria are two genera of (mostly) dwarf succulent plants native to Southern Africa. Often called "jewels of the veld" for their variety of leaf shapes, colors, patterns and translucent, windowed leaf surfaces, they are naturally highly variable plants, even between members of the same species. They are very slow growing cmpared to most plants, but different species readily cross-pollinate and are prone to mutations such as variegation, so in-breeding successive generations of select plants can result in offspring that look nothing like their parents or plants found in nature. They can become botanical works of art. Below are examples showing some of my breeding work. Click images for larger versions.

Zinnia is a genus of annual flowers related to the common Sunflower, native to the arid Southwestern U.S. to South America, with the greatest diversity of colors and forms found in Mexico. As an avid summer gardener, I found they thrived in the intense high elevation sun and dry air of Colorado summers which made them great plants for beds and large containers, but are most often found in common colors such as red and yellow in most garden centers. They are an excellent plant for attracting pollinators and readily set seed, so a few years ago I decided I would seek out some unusual varieties and selectively breed them with common varieties found in local nurseries to create a series of tall (+5ft) plants with unusual colors, mostly in shades of orange, purple and megenta. I started by culling all short and yellow forms from the plants I purchased, then saved seeds from unique individuals of the remaining plants which I grew the following season with the help of a local nursery with a greenhouse facility. As I continued this open pollinated in-breeding process through successive generations, I developed a relatively stable stock of tall growing plants that exhibit a range of solid and bi-colored hues from orange to purple, pink and magenta in single, double and triple flowered forms.

Living in Colorado, I am very fortunate to have easy access to the unique ecosystems and habitats of the Rocky Mountains where I enjoy motorcycle trail riding, hiking, fishing and camping with family and friends during the summer months. What is lesser known is, hidden among the iconic rugged landscapes and Aspen & evergreen forests is an amazing diversity of plant life that I have had the opportunity to learn about through field classes with the Rocky Mountain Conservancy and many hours exploring on my own. I'm particularly fascinated by the wildflowers of the high elevation tundra where the plant life is covered by 10-15 feet of snow for 9 months of the year and sub-alpine forests where a multitude of naitve orchids and shade & moisture loving flowering plants flourish, mostly unnoticed by the casual observer.