Author of the Award-winning Teaming With Microbes: The Organic Gardener’Guide To The Soil Food Web, Teaming With Nutrients: The Organic Gardener’s Guide to Optimizing Plant Nutrition, Teaming With Fungi: The Organic Grower’s Guide to Mycorrhizae, and Teaming With Bacteria: the Organic Gardener’s Guide to Endophytic Bacteria and the Rhizophagy Cycle, Jeff Lowenfels is one of the most humorous and entertaining lecturers on the garden lecture. He is a pretty good writer, too.
He is also a retired lawyer who writes the longest running garden column in North America, having never missed a week in 48 years. The combination of garden writing and law earned him the moniker of “America’s Dirtiest Lawyer,” though with the publication of his third book, a trilogy, he morphed into “Lord of The Roots,” the moniker he keeps even though he now has a quadrilogy of books.
Jeff is a highly respected and popular garden writer. He is the former President of the Garden Writers of America(now GardenCommunicators, a GWA Fellow and in 2005 was inducted into the G
WA Hall of Fame, the highest honor a garden writer can achieve.
Jeff Lowenfels has become a leader in the organic gardening/sustainability movement as a result of his two, best selling books. His talks have converted tens of thousands of gardeners at venues throughout North and South America and Europe. His books have been translated into Korean,Spanish, French, German, Dutch, Turkish, Romanian, Italian with more in the works!
Jeff grew up as an indentured servant on his father’s hobby farm in Scarsdale, New York. There he was forced to plant, weed, mow and pick fruits, flowers and vegetables on an 8 acre ‘gentlemen’s farm’ replete with acres-wide vegetable gardens, a Versailles-style formal flower garden, a 100 tree fruit orchard and countless landscape shrubs, lawns and decorative beds. He escaped to Harvard College where he majored in Geology and the Harvard.
One day back in the early 70’s while attending law school, he was held up and shot. As a result, he ran as far away as he could without a passport and ended up in Anchorage, Alaska. There, he has been able to translate his work-filled childhood into a meaningful and enjoyable hobby and avocation.
Jeff hosted Alaska public television’s most popular show, “Alaska Gardens with Jeff Lowenfels.” The show was so popular, it ran four times a week and aired even in Barrow, way above the Arctic Circle. He also hosted a popular, weekly, garden radio show until his travel schedule lecturing around the world caught up with him.
Most important, Jeff is the founder of a now national program that started as “Plant a Row for Bean’s,” the soup kitchen in Anchorage, and is now “Plant A Row for The Hungry.” The program is active all 50 states an
d Canada and has resulted in millions pounds of garden produce being donated to feed the hungry every year.Jeff is as passionate about “Plant a Row” as he is about organics. He encourages gardeners every where he goes to participate in the program and constantly reminds his fellow garden communicators of the pressing need to solve the hunger problem.