a career in full bloom BY GEORGETTE GOUVEIA
Jan Johnsen has always loved plants, particularly flowering ones – not easy when you grew up in the concrete jungle of New York City, a world of “no plants and no lawnmowers,” says the landscape designer, a principal for 35 years in Johnsen Landscapes & Pools in Croton-on-Hudson. The child of Abstract Expressionist artists — her father studied with Robert Motherwell — Johnsen carved out her own realistic, representational world early on by growing tomato and coleus plants on the family’s fire escape. (Her mother watched in amusement as she once tried to grow corn on a windowsill in vain.) Still, Johnsen persisted, winning first prize as a student at the High School of Music and Art in the 1960s for her study on the beneficial effects of sound on plant growth. (It turns out the high-pitched sounds of birdsong open the pores of leaves, enabling the plants to grow. “It’s absolutely fascinating,” Johnsen says.)
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WAGMAG.COM MAY 2021
That led to a full scholarship to Friends World College, a Quaker school with “no classes and no grades” but plenty of centers and internships worldwide that took her to Mombasa, Kenya, for the study of city planning; Osaka, Japan, to work with a landscape architectural firm; and the University of Hawaii, where she earned a degree in landscape architecture. Johnsen would go on to work with Alain Grumberg, a master gardener from Versailles, at Mohonk Mountain House https://w w w.wagmag.com/round-themountain-to-mohonk/ in New Paltz, where they planted 20,000 flowers from seeds — a real test of a gardener. A stint
