Ark-La-Tex Water Gardens

Our History

"I guess it's okay, but I don't see how you'll ever make a living at it."

I think I'll always remember those words from my father when I told him that I was going to major in Horticulture at college. That was in 1970. I had just graduated from high school. Now its 2007 and we are still going.

For as long as I can remember, I've been interested in plants. Even as a child I would play around with my uncle, who was in college majoring in Forestry. He would tell me the names of the trees and shrubs in the woods. At that time I didn't realize that there was a horticultural industry and I vaguely realized that there was a place that you went to buy plants called a nursery.

As I got older, my interest in plants grew. I found out about the small local nurseries and I bought my first shrubs and fruit trees to plant on my parent’s place. I can remember trying my hand at grafting, something that I had read about, and my mother’s shrubs ended up with several color flowers on the same plant.

In high school I built my first green house. My grandfather had some old windows left from a house that he had remodeled. He gave them to me and I nailed them together into a crude greenhouse. That year I raised tomato plants in discarded beer cans that I collected on the roadside. I sold them for 15 cents each. I sold more than 200 of them! I never dreamed that you could sell that many tomato plants.

The next year I took the money that people gave me as high school graduation gifts and built my next greenhouse. It was a really "big" one, 10' X 20'. It was built out of wood and translucent fiberglass. That year I sold 2000 tomato plants. That was the year that I discovered that you could get a degree in Horticulture at college and that people really do make a living doing this. I had to try. No one in my family had ever been to college.

In May of 1974 I graduated from Louisiana Tech University with two B.S. degrees, one in Botany and one in Horticulture. I immediately started graduate school at Texas A & M University and completed my Masters degree in 1976 in Floriculture. During the summer while in graduate school I worked as a horticulturist for Hodges Gardens neat Florien, La. After graduation I worked for a small nursery in Houston, TX. In July of 1976 I married Mary Gregorcyk and we moved back to Logansport, La. There we started Exotic Plant Farms.

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