Maggie Trent

Maggie Trent did not plan on a career in plants. She took a seasonal job at a garden center in Overland Park the summer after community college, mostly to be outside, and ended up staying six years. Somewhere in the middle of that she went back for an associate degree in horticulture and started doing the buying, which is where the real education happened. Nothing teaches you about plant selection like watching the same three species come back to the returns desk every spring.

She joined Arbor Buddy to help pick the catalog and write the planting and care guides. Her bias is toward trees that establish fast and forgive a bad first year, because most people plant once and then get busy.

She gardens in Zone 6a on clay that she has been amending for nine years with mixed results. Favorite tree is the chinkapin oak. She thinks most people water too little and mulch too much.