The author  was raised on the Florida Keys where leafless vanilla and Encyclia tampensis grew wild. As a teenager he worked for six years at Summerland Orchids where he was introduced to cultivated orchids, including cattleyas. He left the Florida Keys in 1968 to pursue a professional career in Biology, earning a Ph.D. in 1977. He is currently an Ecologist at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington where he teaches and conducts research on sea level rise and coastal  and wetland communities.

The small number of orchids that were carried with him through college and graduate school have grown into a collection of several thousand orchids with cattleyas and phalaenopsis among his favorites. He has received numerous American Orchid Society awards and makes a small number of new hybrids each year. His prize plants, however, are those old clones that dazzled previous hybridizers and still represent a state of perfection today.