Over the years, plants have taught me many things. They have brought me to understand that spaces without plants rarely flourish over the long term. The wrong plant selected without consideration to color or function by the most well-intentioned person can ruin a multi-million-dollar interior at the blink of an eye.

While in Architecture at the University of Arizona, I was privileged to have 'experienced space' through the eyes of a specialist in the field. I have shown over the years a slide presentation first presented by the national IPA. In it, people are shown in airports, museums, city parks and industrial buildings utilizing nature unconsciously to provide for themselves a living environment in which they could surround themselves or merely bump up next to.

Lulu Pokinghorn is a living testament to this understanding.

My degrees are all in education. Having majored in special education, originally, I am in the process of completing a doctorate in Educational Leadership. Plants are about education. They teach us about ourselves, and our relationships to others. They foster our creativity and subtly hang around to support us in what is today, a stressful and expedient world. I have watched and attempted to cajole some of the ugliest plants away from people who beg to take them home. Leaves taped to the tops of open office desks take on a level of importance that only the care of our children brings out in us.

Plants, like people, send out messages announcing to each other that invaders are presently upon them, allowing the others to chemically produce a resistance to such pestilence! They are the great communicators on a level that we are only just now beginning to understand. They are Star Wars at their best!

My doctorate surrounds the nature of power, often suggested by people to be only about authority or control. Educated originally in the 60's, what happened to Flower Power? Had an entire generation forgotten or was it mere window dressing? Lulu Pokinghorn is a creative artifact, my basis of power, which supports this wonderful place we call earth. It is inconsistent with my beliefs to say that when I morally imagine this world, I think of one that is any other color than green!

Our Special Projects page contains a few of those artifacts that I have been privileged to participate in over the last quarter of a century. The artifacts are selected not for size but to show a diversity of experience that we, meaning the wonderfully creative, professional, and friendly staff I have been surrounded by through the years, have come to appreciate as our own form of plant power!