About C. Darren Butler the Gardener: GardenZeus™ Divine Gardening

Over the years I have accumulated professional qualifications and accomplishments to distinguish me and help me to earn a living as an independent landscape consultant, teacher, designer, and speaker. I shared some of these qualifications in GardenZeus™ Divine Gardening. In this post I will share a glimpse of my human story as a gardener.

My beginnings as a gardener and arborist were in a strip of trees behind the home where I grew up as a young child, the last remant of what had been a native woods in upstate New York. I played among the trees and began climbing them by the time I was walking. When I was about five years old, my parents started a vegetable garden for the first time. I remember the first seeds I ever planted, snap peas, and the wonder and amazement I felt in doing so.

As a tween, I had a paper route but also started an independent business doing weeding and landscape chores, and by my mid-teens, I was working summers in landscaping. After a serious car accident at age 18, and a months-long recovery from critical injuries, I found relief working with plants, as a groundskeeper at a large memorial park in Northern California.

Over my lifetime I have gardened extensively in New York (as a child), Utah, and Southern California, with professional plant-care experience also in Northern California. In the mid-1990s, I began the long process of teaching myself how to garden in the alkaline clay soil and dry Mediterranean climate of the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles. I became a University of California Master Gardener in 2005, and began designing landscapes, and consulting as a landscape/garden/irrigation expert and arborist that same year.

In my next post, I’ll share the amazement I feel about the process of photosynthesis.