Debra Yourick is a farm girl through and through. She helped her parents and siblings with putting hay in the barn for the beef cattle, planting, weeding and harvesting from a very large vegetable garden. Deb didn’t understand what surrounded her on long walks through grass stands that included gorgeous clusters of butterfly weed, tradescantia, common milkweed, blue flag, cattails, wild bergamot and boneset, all showing off along the roadside and wetlands or in the pastures. Deb now helps care for this Michigan farmland of meadows, woods, a stream and riverside that her parents kept in conservation for more than 30 years.

With her first home, Deb decided to take a series of courses in landscaping and horticulture from the USDA. With visits to landscaped manors and formal gardens in the DC area, she learned about ways to help people experience their gardens using plants with multiple season interest, garden rooms, walled gardens, water features, and much more. Her community in Maryland sought to place her home on the garden tour just before she moved to a farmette not far away. Even though her new home’s gardens were developed using many nonnatives, she’s now reworking her whole landscape to include many natives and noninvasive nonnatives; this experience can help her to guide others to benefit their own longstanding landscapes.

Besides gardening (is there anything else?), Deb enjoys cooking the standards and anything that inspires her from traveling or her favorite restaurants in the Washington area. From her work in science and her early life in rural America where she wished she had science mentorship, she took a strong interest in education knowing that many don’t have access to the mind-expanding experience of digging deeper into science, personally or professionally.

Favorite native plant - Common Milkweed, Asclepias syriaca