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Bio - Les
I’m Les - photographer, gardener and all around nice guy.
I was born during the Nixon Administration in Kansas City, Kansas where I spent the first 25 years of my life. My parents were both raised by very rural parents, and brought their own knowledge of farming into my rather suburban childhood. Our house always had an enormous garden, and our yard was outlined with flower beds, trees and beautiful shrubs.
As a kid, I had a very skewed perspective on gardening - I believed it was something that everyone did. It wasn’t until I reached school age and began to visit the homes of friends did I discover that not every kid had a garden at home. How did they can their tomatoes and homemade salsa if they didn’t have a garden? Much to my surprise, one could buy tomatoes at THE GROCERY STORE! Could you imagine such a thing? Paying a supermarket for TOMATOES??? Absurd.
During my tumultuous teenage years, I lost all interest in gardening and plantlife. I wanted only to escape, what I perceived at the time to be a small, intellectually bankrupt, culturally bereft wasteland that was Kansas City, and move to the big city. So I moved to Chicago, where I would find that even the micro-scale balcony agriculture that I practiced in fits and starts in my Kansas City apartments would prove to be an enormous challenge.
As I grew into adulthood, and into the working world, like most adults of a certain generation I couldn’t afford to live in anything more grand than an apartment, especially while I was living in Chicago, and would not have the luxury of my own garden. But around the time of my 30th birthday, I had the good fortune to live in a two-flat in Chicago where the landlady lived upstairs. She had a microscopic backyard, approximately the size of my living room, and it was bisected by a brick walking path that led to a deck atop the stone garage. We, however, managed to grow crops of tomatoes and peppers using an ingenious bushel basket/shopping bag combination on top of the deck in the extraordinarily hot summers — it was through this “make it work” learning that I began to re-discover not only my love of plants and the outdoors, but that it was essential to my life and my peace and happiness, and I was a fool to deprive myself of it.
So, now I’m in Seattle, where the famously mild climate and year-round growing season laid out another learning curve for me, but I think I’ve learned a lot. Part of the great fun of gardening for me is the research, the information, the scientific elements of it - and most importantly realizing that at the end of it all, no amount of science can force the hand of nature.
For me, the meditation of the garden is one of the purest joys to know - to accept nature’s bounty and to enjoy the fruits (no pun intended!) of your labors of love.
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