Biography: Louise Lungle

Growing up on a farm on the Prairies, Louise remembers the joy of playing in the garden. The giant leaves of rhubarb plants were little hide-aways for herself and her younger brother. The succulent strawberries of June, the astonishing growth of the asparagus spears, these were magical things to her as a child.

Louise says she didn't really learn many practical gardening skills while she was growing up, but she's since made up for that the hard way--trial and error. Her first garden on her own was a case in point. To help condition the soil and give her new garden a good start, Louise added as many bags of horse manure from a roadside stand as her car trunk could hold. In what seemed like just a few days, the new plants in her small garden plot shot up to about 3 or 4 inches--and then stayed that way for the rest of the summer, a stunted little forest absolutely embalmed in fresh fertilizer! She now calls it her "demonstration garden," demonstrating just how little she knew about gardening.

Until now, gardening has only been a pleasant pastime for Louise. She spent her early career in the information technology field as a business analyst helping organizations improve their business operations. She then moved into strategic planning where she developed long-range business plans for private and public sector companies. Discovering an affinity for communications, Louise obtained a degree in marketing and journalism. She now works as a communications, marketing and publishing consultant, and describes her work on the Slugs and Salal Web site as a happy convergence of her two passions, gardening and communications.