The soil that grew a zoo gardener
When asked about when and where her love for plants began, Danielle Green let out a low whistle.
“Lord have mercy,” she said in her earthy, Southern timbre.
But it’s more than just her voice. Everything about Green is earthy. Her very name evokes the color of nature around her. It’s for the best, really, seeing as she works in the earth every day as a zoo horticulturist, someone who cultivates the introduction and maintenance of plants in zoological gardens.
“Grew up in Virginia Beach, so big beach girl, always loved being outside. Bit of a tom-boy, obviously, always playing in the dirt and climbing trees.”
Green briefly rotated one of her many rainbow-string bracelets and slid her reflective-lensed sunglasses further back on her head. Her curly brown hair was pulled tight against her scalp in a no-nonsense bun, but her open-hoop earrings seemed to imply that at least some silly nonsense was allowed.
Her grandmother had a garden, which she said was the catalyst to her life-long love of plants.
Green was also the first in her family to graduate college, which was an important milestone for her. And while she knew she didn’t want to work in the monotony an office, she always gravitated to science.
“I was always investigating something and I was drawn to that sort of a process.”
While Green worked at a seafood restaurant in college, one of her coworkers mentioned that her organization skills and her biology major made her the perfect fit for an inventory control position at a garden center. She applied, got the job and began researching each plant that came into the store so she could make plant tags for them. In her words, she “got” to do research. It was a privilege for her.
Eventually, she moved up to a management position and was a part-owner of the company when she left.
“With Grandma being such a big influence on me, I was never going to leave Virginia until she passed,” Green said. “So, she did, and I was like, ‘I’m ready to go.’”
Green said that, in the 90s, she and her classmates would discuss their potential career fields with jobs like working in a garden center or designing landscapes for residential and commercial clients.
“That’s all we really knew at that point. So, I decided, ‘I’m getting out of here,’ and I started applying for jobs all over the place.”
In Atlanta, Green found an opening for a position called ‘interior plants.’
The job was a position planning out plant designs for commercial buildings, like shopping centers and doctors’ offices.
“I thought, well that might be kind of interesting… but I hated it,” Green said. “There was a lawyer’s office that paid something like $100 a month to have eight orchids swapped out of their office every two weeks.”
Yes, that’s right, not have the orchids taken care of or watered, but actually have the orchids swapped out for new ones that looked fresh. On the plus side, Green and her colleagues got to take the “old” orchids home.
Green knew this position just wasn’t for her, and that’s when she saw in ad in the paper for a zoo horticulturist at Zoo Atlanta. She applied and got it.
“I remember contacting my college professor and saying, ‘This is a real thing. You need to tell people about this. This is amazing,’ because there’s no degree in zoo horticulture, it’s just horticulture.”
It turned out zoo horticulture was the perfect path for her, as she went on to become the president of the Association of Zoo Horticulture around the same time she began work as the director of gardens and grounds at the Naples Zoo.
The goal of the association is to connect zoo horticulturists to make their jobs easier. If one zoo is getting a new exhibit or an animal transfer, the zoo horticulturist will call the other zoo to find out what plants the animals are used to. And on the other hand, a horticulturist may call another zoo in advance to give that horticulturist a heads up on the personalities they’re about to encounter.
“You call and say, ‘hey, our zebras are going to your zoo, p.s. by the way, they kill everything.’”
Green attended her first AZH conference in 2000, but didn’t return until 2006.
“They were like, ‘hey, you’re young; you’re enthusiastic and energetic, and you really like what you’re doing, and we need people to serve on our board.”
So, Green took on a position as treasurer. She managed the association’s money while attending conferences and giving presentations on AZH’s behalf.
“So, then, it became about, who’s going to lead this organization moving forward?”
Green had been on the board for six years and knew about the financial situation of the association as it had grown through the years. So, she ran for president and won. She stepped down recently, but not before planning last year’s AZH conference, which was slated to take place at the Naples Zoo… in September.
“We were a little busy with other things,” Green said.
Yeah, those things being the massive clean up efforts from the destruction of Hurricane Irma. While walking around the zoo, Green pointed out each exhibit that needed to be re-planted after Irma, including an entire exhibit that had been destroyed in the storm, allowing two gazelles to escape. They survived the storm, but didn’t survive the tranquilizers used to recapture them.
The conference was rescheduled to December. While 115 people were slated to attend the September conference, 88 people attended what Green called the do-over December conference. Green said that all in all, it wasn’t bad considering everything had to be rescheduled.
“Why plan one conference when you can plan two and clean up from a hurricane in between?”
There were two days of speakers and presentations, with topics ranging from integrated pest management to exhibit design and maintenance, and two days of field trips, where Green split up groups of attendees who chose to go to J.N. “Ding” Darling National Wildlife Refuge on Sanibel Island or Corkscrew Swap Sanctuary. The final day was spent at the Naples Botanical Garden and, of course, the Naples Zoo.
“It’s nerve-wracking in some sense because you get everyone who does what you do for a living, and you’ve just invited them to your house to critique everything, except we just had a major hurricane, so, I was like, ‘be kind.”
While Green’s love for plants was born from her grandmother’s garden, it was grown in the soil of her own life and in the opportunity to pass on the importance of horticulture to the next generation.
“Most children are raised to associate life with ears and eyes and button noses and whiskers,” Green said. “So, they grow up and they don’t understand that plants are living too.”
Green is a protector of the little guy. She stands up for plants because they are just as vital to the earth as humans and animals, but they rarely get the appreciation she feels they deserve.
“I think I have always loved animals,” Green said. “But I have also loved having the opportunity to open people’s eyes to something larger than they had been aware of before.”
For now, Green is content at the Naples Zoo. However, she maintains that her dream job is the one that got away: a position at the Queen Elizabeth Botanical Garden on Grand Cayman Island.
“I thought, ‘how cool is that? I’m going to live on an island in the Caribbean and make a living doing that. I’m still in pursuit of that dream, but, right now, I’m pretty close.”
