Meet Allan Armitage

There are people who teach horticulture, and then there are people who seem to breathe it. Dr. Allan M. Armitage has spent a lifetime turning gardens into classrooms, classrooms into adventures, and science into something that even the most hesitant backyard gardener could understand without feeling intimidated. Along the way, he became one of horticulture’s most recognizable voices — not because he chased attention, but because he genuinely loved sharing what he knew.

And that’s a lot.

Long before the international lectures, bestselling books, and awards crowding the shelves, Allan was simply a curious Canadian kid fascinated by the natural world. That curiosity carried him through studies at McGill University, the University of Guelph, and Michigan State University, where he built the scientific backbone of a career that would eventually stretch across continents. But degrees were never the whole story. Plenty of people know plants. Allan had the rare ability to make other people care about them too.

For decades, he became closely tied to the University of Georgia, where he served as Professor of Horticulture until retiring in 2014. “Retirement,” however, turned out to be more of a technicality than a lifestyle. He kept teaching online courses, writing, speaking, consulting, traveling, and somehow finding time to continue spreading the gospel of good gardening with equal parts expertise and humor.

One of his most visible legacies at UGA remains the Trial Gardens, which began as a university project and grew into one of the horticultural world’s most respected proving grounds. Southern heat and humidity can humble even the prettiest plant tags at the garden center, and the Trial Gardens became a place where breeders, growers, and gardeners could separate the true performers from the dramatic divas. Years later, the gardens still help shape what ultimately lands in nurseries and landscapes across the South.

His influence, though, stretches far beyond Athens. Over the course of his career, Allan produced more than seventy academic papers and hundreds of industry articles, including a monthly column for Greenhouse Grower magazine that has been running for more than forty years — remarkably without repeating himself once. Most people struggle to come up with new dinner ideas after Tuesday. Allan found fresh ways to talk about plants for four straight decades.

And then there are the books.

Perhaps calling them “gardening books” feels a little too limiting. Yes, Herbaceous Perennial Plants became one of the field’s landmark references and earned recognition as one of the greatest gardening books of its era. But Allan’s writing never stayed trapped in textbook territory for long. He mixed science with storytelling, practical advice with humor, and enough personality to remind readers that gardeners are often wonderfully eccentric people.

Titles like Of Naked Ladies and Forget-Me-Nots and It’s Not Just About the Hat reflected that lighter side. His stories wandered comfortably between plant lore, travel, misadventures, and life observations, often sounding less like a lecture and more like a conversation you hoped would keep going over dinner. More recently, The Common-Sense Gardener reinforced what readers already knew: Allan had a gift for cutting through gardening nonsense with warmth, wit, and practicality.

That balance between scholarship and accessibility defined nearly everything he touched. Long before apps became the standard answer to every modern question, Allan embraced technology with “Armitage’s Great Garden Plants”, a smartphone app referenced well over 100,000 times by both professionals and home gardeners. Turns out people still appreciate reliable advice when trying to figure out why their hydrangea looks personally offended.

His reputation as a speaker carried him around the globe, from Canada to Portugal, Colombia, Australia, and New Zealand. Audiences gathered not simply to hear about plants, but to hear Allan talk about plants — which is an important distinction. Through his company, Garden Vistas, he also led tours to some of the world’s great gardens for more than thirty years, blending education, storytelling, and travel into something far more memorable than the average guided tour. People came home with photographs, certainly, but also with a newfound ability to actually notice gardens.

Along the way, Allan introduced more than twenty plants into the gardening world, including the enormously popular Verbena ‘Homestead Purple’ and the ornamental sweet potato ‘Margarita.’ For many horticulturists, that alone would be enough to cement a career. For Allan, it somehow became just another chapter.

Recognition followed steadily over the years. He earned honors for teaching, writing, research, and service from organizations across the horticultural world, including the Liberty Hyde Bailey Award from the American Horticultural Society, the Garden Club of America Medal of Honor, and the University of Georgia’s Josiah Meigs Award, the university’s highest teaching honor. In 2024, McGill University named him Alumni of the Year, a meaningful full-circle moment from where his academic journey first began.

Outside the garden, another passion has kept him equally competitive: tennis. In 2018, he helped lead a team to a USTA National Championship in his age division, followed by another top national finish the next year. In 2024, he captured gold in the Georgia Senior Olympics with his doubles partner. He has also maintained — with suspicious confidence — that he could have beaten Roger Federer had Federer not inconveniently retired first.

Closer to home, STROLL Five Points featured Allan alongside his fellow “parketeers,” neighbors dedicated to restoring and maintaining small green spaces throughout Five Points, last September. The work reflects much of what has guided his career all along: gardens are never just about plants. They are about stewardship, curiosity, beauty, and the communities that grow around them.

And of course, there is Susan!

Through every chapter, there has been Susan. By Allan’s own account, much of what he accomplished happened because she was beside him the entire way. Behind the lectures, books, gardens, flights, deadlines, and endless miles was a partnership that quietly made the whole remarkable pace of life possible.

Allan and Susan moved their growing family to Athens years ago when UGA came calling. After their first Georgia spring arrived in full bloom, Allan realized this place might just work — even if summer occasionally felt like gardening inside a sauna. Nearly two decades ago, a move to Five Points gave them the chance to transform an older home into a warm and updated empty nest surrounded, naturally, by beautiful gardens.

That combination of expertise, humor, curiosity, humility, and genuine joy explains why Allan Armitage remains such a beloved figure in horticulture. He never simply taught people how to grow plants. He taught them how to notice the world around them a little more carefully — preferably while getting their hands dirty.