Volume 12, Number 3, 2004
Many Longwood Fellows graduate with an armload of awards garnered at professional conferences and from area garden associations and community service projects, but the highest honor a Longwood Fellow can receive is the Louise Roselle Fellowship in Public Horticulture.
Established in 2001 through a Unidel Foundation grant, the award recognizes Louise Roselle, the wife of University President David Roselle and an avid gardener, who has made many aesthetic and horticultural contributions to the University campus.
The fellowship is granted to a first-year Fellow who has made significant research progress and shows great leadership potential. Shannon Still, the first recipient, now is pursing his doctorate in horticulture at the University of California at Davis. The most recent recipient, Mark Highland, is a second-year Longwood Fellow whose research involves identifying a suitable soil mix substitute for peat, a valuable wildlife resource that is being depleted for horticultural use.
The 2002 winner, Cindy Sobaski, graduated from the program last May. She credits Longwood with helping her develop her career focus combining her loves of plants, people and teaching.
Today, she is director of education at the 100-acre Lauritzen Gardens in Omaha, Neb., where she's in charge of a wide range of programs for adults and children.
"Through the Longwood Graduate Program, I developed a deep understanding of how public gardens function," Sobaski says. "The program's team approach helped me to develop the skills necessary to implement a successful program or event while utilizing the abilities of the gardens' staffs. These are skills I am using every day at Lauritzen Gardens."
--Margo McDonough, AS '86, '95M