Renee Shepherd
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Renee Shepherd is a gardening entrepreneur and writer known for heirloom seed advocacy and garden-based cooking using home-grown herbs. Better Homes and Gardens called her "a groundbreaking gardener",[1] and Businessweek a "pioneering innovator" who helped popularize specialty vegetables and cottage garden flowers for home gardening and gourmet restaurants.[2]
Shepherd earned a doctorate from the University of California, Santa Cruz in the early 1980s. While teaching environmental studies, she met a Dutch seed dealer who encouraged her interest in seed varieties. She began her own seed distribution company in 1983.[3] Shepherd's Garden Seeds was a small mail-order seed company specializing in uncommon vegetable and flower seeds. In 1988, the business was purchased by White Flower Farm, a larger mail-order nursery in Litchfield, Connecticut, which eventually closed it.[4] Anne Raver, a gardening writer for The New York Times, cited the sale as an example of "an increasingly familiar story … : a small specialty nursery known for unique plants is bought by a larger company hoping to take advantage of its cutting-edge appeal and to get new plants for mass marketing. What ensues is invariably a loss of diversity … and, often, a loss of the vision that made the nursery attractive to begin with." In 1997, Shepherd went on to start a new business, Renee's Garden Seeds,[5] based in Felton, California.[6] In 2006, Renee's Garden Seeds were sold at 900 retail outlets in the United States, with 250 varieties of flowers, vegetables and herbs.[7] In 2011, 2.5 million seed packets representing more than 400 varieties were sold online and at 1,500 garden centers in the United States and Canada.[8]
