Putting Her Mettle to Some New Petals

Katy Ross Warner has three more checks to sign before she can begin the phone interview. The sound of executive pen scratching comes over the line, and then the new president of the American Horticultural Society is ready to talk. Last month, she was chosen to lead the 80-year-old society into the 21st century for two reasons, she says. First, there is the small matter of turning the United States into “a land of gardens and nation of gardeners.”

Second, the society is banking that she will bring blockbuster commercial instincts to a nonprofit organization. Warner comes very much from the “for-profit world.” After earning a degree in landscape architecture from the University of Arizona, she worked for close to a quarter of a century, from 1976 to 2000, at Walt Disney World in Lake Buena Vista, Fla., working her way up from gardener to director of horticulture. There she had 700 horticulturalists tending 30,000 acres serving 40 million visitors every year.

Taken at face value, the move has an infancy-to-senility quality. The American Horticultural Society is by reputation blue-rinse, Daughters of the American Revolution territory. The headquarters are set on 26 acres in Alexandria, Va., on River Farm, a historic property that once belonged to George Washington. There, the staff of 20 puts out the bimonthly national magazine, the American Gardener, for 26,000 members and works with the British-based publisher Dorling Kindersley on garden reference books. It also maintains the society’s public gardens, runs an education program for school gardens and ensures its members a nice collection of perks, from seed exchange programs to free entrance to garden shows.

But for Warner, the jump from landscaping around “Camp Minnie-Mickey” to encouraging the public to visit George Washington’s azalea and dogwood garden isn’t all that big. To her, in both places, it’s all about the plants.

At Disney, she says, the theme park bought enough land to create a rural illusion and plants became surprise stars. An early horticultural staff of 100 grew sevenfold. “We went for beautiful, interesting gardens with a broad palette of plants that told the story of different places around the world, of deserts and jungles,” she says.

In doing so, she says, Disney “showcased the variety of flowers that can be grown in Florida and dramatically changed what was sold there.” It was Disney gardens, she adds, that popularized bedding plants in Florida, acclimating begonias and finding which pansies did best there. “With our animal kingdom, we were the first ones to use ornamental grasses on a major scale,” she says.

All very impressive. But what will it mean to Californians? Bart O’Brien, director of Horticulture at Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden, one of three gardens in the state dedicated to California native plants, says the national organization has never really penetrated west of the Rockies. “It’s an East Coast organization, and really a lot of what they do isn’t that relevant to the West Coast,” he says. Californians looking to Virginia for direction on how to garden “would be the same thing as the Huntington Botanical Gardens trying to cater to New Yorkers. It doesn’t make sense.”

Tom Eltzroth, a professor of horticulture at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and director of its Leaning Pine Arboretum, agrees that Californians have always regarded themselves as a breed apart. The climate and flora are so different, most of the wisdom from the East simply doesn’t translate in California, he says. The rift is so deep that when the American Horticultural Society and the U.S. Department of Agriculture came out with a national heat tolerance index in the mid-1990s, California didn’t use it.

“We just sort of kissed it off,” he says. “It was very, very flawed.” Whereas it delineated fewer than a dozen heat zones, the Sunset Publishing Corp. developed a system with 24 zones. “The Sunset system has taken priority because it’s so much more accurate,” he says. “If you go into any nursery, they’ll say, ‘Let’s look it up in Sunset.’”

But if California horticulturalists are aloof from the national organization, on a personal level, one of Warner’s biggest fans is Peter Atkins, chief executive officer of the Arboretum of Los Angeles County in Arcadia. “Katy and I have had a professional relationship bordering on a love affair for like 25 years,” he says, hastily adding that he is happily married. But he is such a Warner fan that he has roped her into the 18-person board of the arboretum.

Her genius, he says, isn’t replacing local organizations but in her attitude and philosophy of making plants an “attraction.” “Katy brought to Disney the concept that if you give people a beautiful, exciting, floriferous, lush landscape, that would be as much of an attraction, if not more so, than Mickey Mouse,” he says.

Her landscaping helped attract 40 million through the gates of Disney World every year, and the American Horticultural Society is clearly not the only organization hoping she can repeat the trick. Atkins says that he is involving her here because he wants to increase the arboretum’s attendance from its current 300,000 visitors a year to 750,000.

Elzroth agrees that getting people into arboretums across the country will encourage gardening. “The more you encourage gardening, the more people will become environmentally conscious and become more aware of what happens when we spray pesticides and overfertilize. Once you get involved, you start talking to other people and going to conferences,” he says. “Being rah-rah for gardening is the socially responsible thing.”

Atkins describes it as socially essential. Behind the plans for raising attendance at the arboretum is a quest. “At the root of everything we do,” Atkins says, “is the concept of ethno-botany, or the relationship between people and plants. The single message to our visitors is that our lives are 100% dependent on plants. Without plants, we die. No plants, no oxygen. No food.”

From back in George Washington’s place in Virginia, Warner reels off what she sees as the list of challenges facing American gardeners: lawns in arid areas, asphalt put where grass should be, parks unsafe for children, pesticide abuse, the need for horticulture to be taught in schools, and so on.

But then she slows down, and the businesswoman who has given America marching orders to get out and garden suddenly poses a teasing, eternal question: “What does beauty look like?” she says. “Then how are we going to deliver on that beauty?”