Jeanne McCarty  Executive Director

Growing up in the Piney Woods of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, Jeanne spent hours watching the frogs and crawdads in the meandering creek behind her family’s home.   

Jeff Cross  Director of Finance and Operations

Finance has always been one of Jeff’s strengths. When he was a kid, his parents commissioned him to pull weeds in the backyard. After a couple days of toil, Jeff did the math - he was only earning a quarter of a cent per weed! He asked for a raise.   

Scott Feille  Regional Program Director

For Scott, fishing trips with Granddad “J” at Caddo Lake in East Texas weren’t about fishing. “Looking back, catching fish was secondary,” he recalls.   

Sarah Darley  Program Assistant

It was under the towering pine trees at her family’s lake house in East Texas that Sarah first stood in awe of nature and came to appreciate being small…and yet a part of something greater.  

Jennifer Fitzgerald  Director of Community Relations

Carefully, carefully, Jennifer's small fingers worked the scissors, trimming the green beans for her father to sell for the family business to Chicago's restaurants, hotels and hospitals. With both sound...   

Matt Hackler  Director of Partnerships and Programming

As a child, Matt Hackler’s experience of gardening came from his grandparent’s one-acre garden in East Texas.  He dreaded being awakened on those early summer mornings to trudge down what looked to him like endless rows of peas, beans, and squash and clutching an increasingly heavy feed bucket.    

Nancy Payne  Garden Designer

Growing up in the Puerto Rico mountains, with her home surrounded by a lush coffee plantation on two sides and a zoo with roaring lions and elephants on the other, Nancy remembers treading dirt roads, past tall grasses and the neighbor's cows, to visit friends.   

Kerry Renta  Garden Design Consultant

Kerry grew up in a small, North Central Texas farming town surrounded by corn, cotton and sorghum fields. Hiding in tall rows of corn, he’d try to ambush meadowlarks. “Thank goodness I was unsuccessful,” he remembers.   

Ellen Robinson  Educator

"As a young adult, I felt myself pulled towards mountains. After graduating college, I moved to Colorado where I lived at the base of the Rockies. There is a certain amount of grace that comes with walking up to a grocery store backdropped by jagged peaks."   

Eric Vanderbeck  Educator

Deep in the quiet woods behind his home, 10-year-old Eric felt content and protected as he explored nature’s hidden mysteries, poking his finger into every conceivable crevice for investigations of what lived there.