My mother’s story does not begin with a greenhouse or a garden center. It begins in an orchard.

Her father tended an orchard in the Ukraine, and from him she learned the earliest lessons of gardening—how to work the soil, how to be patient with growing things, and how food and land can sustain a family. As a child, she worked beside her mother also learning that gardens were not ornamental luxuries but lifelines.

That understanding followed her family when they immigrated to Canada. They arrived with little more than determination and were given the chance to claim land in one of the coldest and most inhospitable regions of the country. Ownership came with strict conditions: the land had to be fenced, worked, and occupied for a required period of time. My grandfather walked an entire day to town to gather supplies regularly. My grandmother once survived for a month on onions because that was what they had and so she could give her family better. Survival depended on what they could grow and preserve.

From those beginnings, my mother learned endurance, thrift, and an unshakeable work ethic—values rooted as deeply as the trees her father once tended.

She later followed my father to the United States, where they raised six children and lived what would become our family’s version of the American dream. In 1982, she started the nursery business with just six flats of marigolds. She remembers worrying that she wouldn’t sell them.

Industry sales representatives—well known, experienced men—would visit and offer advice that often came wrapped in condescension. “Sweetheart, you need to get yourself a good book.” She lacked formal training, but she had something better: her experiences and determination. She persevered and learned everything she could about the nursery industry.

My father, a law professor would have time off in the summers and we would travel across country to Canada to visit family and my mom’s vacations became trips to other nurseries. She learned as she went.  She attended industry events. She read every magazine she could find related to the trade. She learned not just how to grow plants, but how to grow a business.  She is always learning.

Her first retail space was a reclaimed gas station. She and my Dad enclosed the canopy with polygal and cinderblock to create a modest storefront and greenhouse like structure. Across the street stood a large competitor, Wolfe Nursery, part of the Sunbelt Nursery group. Everyone thought she was crazy opening up across the street from this well known nursery.  She watched them closely, learning everything she could—until one day, they went out of business. She later purchased that location, her second location.

When it came time to name the nursery, my brother Mark looked across the street and said, “Well, if they’re the Wolfe Nursery, we need to be Little Red Riding Hood Nursery.” And just like that, the fable played out in real life: Little Red Riding Hood outlasted the Big Bad Wolfe.

During this time, my mother ran two nurseries, cared for her elderly father, and made sure my five older brothers had work opportunities at the nursery while they attended college. I remember late nights of her doing all the bookkeeping by hand—this was long before online accounting systems—just ledgers, pencils, an adding machine and sheer resolve.

I was eight years old when I began learning the nursery business. I grew up watching my mother grow—literally and figuratively. By the time I finished college as the youngest child, she and my Dad had purchased their third location in a rapidly growing part of town. There, they built a large greenhouse, and my father named it Mary Lee Gardens.

This marked a new chapter. She was no longer only a retailer; she was now a grower. She built that operation from the ground up. Most of my brothers eventually pursued other paths. I returned to the family business and leased Little Red Riding Hood Nursery, while she grew Mary Lee Gardens alongside my brother Mark. Eventually, Mark branched off and opened his own nursery, Slide Plant Market.

In one of her many road trips she discovered pansies.  No one in the area grew pansies for the winter months yet and I am proud to say she was the first in Lubbock, Texas to have them.  She was always flying home on the plane with plants wrapped up to bring new and unusual plants to our dry West Texas town.  She experimented endlessly looking for how things grew or didn’t and shared this knowledge with everyone.

What my mother built was not just a business—it was a community.

She taught countless people along the way, always paying it forward. To this day, people still come to me and say, “I worked for your mother.” They tell me how she hired them when they needed a second chance, how she adjusted hours for a single mother, how she stayed late so someone else could go home to their family. Kindness was never a policy—it was simply who she is.

Today, my mother is 92 years old. She still works every day. She still covers full Saturdays so employees can spend time with their families. She is a Ukrainian powerhouse—unyielding, practical, generous, and deeply rooted.

Forty-four years after those six flats of marigolds, she runs the most successful nursery operation in Lubbock, Texas. And I—her daughter, now running Little Red Nursery—carry her lessons forward.

I learned this industry at her side. I learned how to work, how to endure, how to lead with integrity, and how to grow something meaningful from almost nothing. My mother’s life is proof that resilience, humility, and relentless learning can build not just businesses, but legacies.

She is my industry inspiration because she showed me that growth—real growth—begins underground, long before anyone sees the blooms.