During the latter stages of an initial career as a clinical social worker with the chronically mentally ill, Colleen switched gears and entered a part-time gardening track at the New York Botanical Garden. Her goal, subsequent to years of gardening all over the United States, (while following her IBM husband), was to become a professional gardener. After years of working soil both productive and poor, decades of gathering knowledge from books, magazines and remarkable gardeners, keeping garden diaries, experimenting with hundreds of plants, fielding questions, starting seeds, and researching garden issues, she found herself nudged toward a different path from the one she’d expected when she obtained a Master’s in Social Work from Columbia University in the 1970’s.
It was the right thing to do.
Now a popular garden author, lecturer, instructor and coach, Colleen is a member of Garden Writers of America, the Garden Clubs of America, Tri-State Hosta Society, Mad Gardeners, The Nature Conservancy, The Garden Conservancy, and many other groups. Her award-winning one-acre ornamental garden has been on numerous tours, and serves as a living classroom laboratory where she teaches composting, composition, color and many additional how-to’s of gardening. She runs a garden coaching business, and teaches gardening at the New York Botanical Garden. She lends her time and expertise to the local garden club as well as to other non-profit groups. A recent project was the planning, implementation and maintenance of the garden at the local Methodist Church in her quaint New England town.
Her essays, memoir pieces and feature articles have appeared in publications such as People, Places and Plants, Fine Gardening, GreenPrints, The Litchfield Review, Connecticut Gardener and Toastmaster. Her most recent book is Mentors in the Garden of Life, and her murder mystery, Gone to Jericho, introduces a protagonist who not only is a compassionate psychiatric aide at an about-to-close rural psychiatric hospital, but a skilled gardener as well.
Colleen trials perennials and shrubs for national growers, grows approximately 1,000 different types of annuals, perennials, vines, herbs, shrubs, and trees in her personal garden, where every season remains a delightful challenge.
Each winter she continues to monitor the lengthening days and increasing warmth of the sun in preparation for the opening of the soil for a new year of planting.
Along the way Colleen and her husband, Jerry Shike, found time to raise three children, who now reside in Beijing, Florida and Connecticut.
