| > Valerie Allgrove > About me
About me
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About me: I am a Windsor, CT native, but spent my summers growing up on a small lake in lower New Hampshire. I learned to love the outdoor world through camping, hiking, and human-powered boating. In the winters I did a lot of "armchair adventuring" through books from the Windsor Public Library.
Early on, my Dad encouraged my interest in wildflowers and showed me things like Mayflowers, Trillium, and Ladyslippers. I had one of the "Golden Guides" to Wildflowers and enjoyed learning the names of things I would find on my walks. I slowly began to realize that not everything I found could be identified by that book and began to enter the world of the Petersen Field Guides as well as Gray's Botany.
Rather than collecting these plants, many of which are rare and endangered, I began to take photographs of them for later identification. There is a story I like to tell about a flowering shrub I found on a bike ride in New London in 1995 that I did not learn the name of until 1999, despite carrying the photograph with me and accosting all plant-knowledgeable people for information. Cary Nearing of Windsor finally suggested that it might be Calycanthus floridus, and it took only a few minutes of a web search to find images and confirm the identification.
I use the web extensively to search for very rare plants, especially native orchids. By using search engines I am able to find mention of specific plants. From there I can get a general idea of where to hunt, often with good results. There are a number of nature preserves where large populations of rare orchids exist. Some of them require permits from the Fish and Wildlife Departments to enter restricted areas and adventurers are advised to contact the regional F&W if interested. There are other populations that are not listed and F&W is pleased to be notified of their existence.
I still live in Windsor and have as my home a 1910 farmhouse that I'm renovating and have surrounded with extensive gardens. I work full-time in the corporate world and find time to travel, take pictures, create original recipes involving herbs, paint watercolor pictures, and write stories about my adventures.
My home gardens concentrate on herbs for cooking (especially lavender!), native perennials for low-maintenance gardens, and tropical orchids that I grow outside in the summer, and in my heated back porch in the winter. I started growing tropical orchids in February of 2000 and have been very active with the Connecticut Orchid Society. I have over 100 orchids, and am especially interested in Cattleyas, Stanhopeas, and other fragrant New World varieties.
In the past few years I have been giving talks on Growing Tropical Orchids at Home, Autumn Woods in New England, Spring Wildflowers in New England, and Gardening With Native Perennials. I'm in the process of learning about Bog Gardening and continuing my curiosity about the natural world in general.
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