I enjoyed speaking at the Master Gardener College on the North Carolina State University Campus last week. The title of my presentation was Growing Plants, Growing People: Land Grant Colleges, the Extension Service, and Master Gardeners. The presentation was basically a history lesson on how land-grant colleges, the Extension Service and the Master Gardener program evolved. The Master Gardener program started in the 1970s in Washington State. The two Extension specialists who started it had both studied in Germany and learned that Germans bestow titles for hard‐earned proficiency levels in various crafts. The top proficiency level in horticulture is denoted by “Gartenmeister,” which they anglicized as “Master Gardener. And the rest is history.
