My yellow cab snakes its way down a narrow twisting street. Tiny storefronts overflow onto the sidewalks where vendors hawk cheap imported goods. An old woman in a wheelchair rolls down the middle of the street, seemingly oblivious to the cars and buses that pass within inches of her. Delivery vans sometimes entirely block what is little more than an alley. The meter ticks away dollars and cents.

My Egyptian driver asks me again what address I’m looking for. I apologize and dig through my bag to find the scrap of paper with the scribbled location on it.

The retired BellSouth manager says she first realized she was an artist in the seventh grade. Temporarily relocated from Jacksonville, FL to a new school in Pompano Beach, she found herself in an art class.  “And I thought, hey! I can do this! This is great!” But a short month later she was uprooted again. This time, there was no art class at her school, and her inner artist took a backseat for the next thirty years.

When Tara Dillard married into the Cofer family and moved onto the family estate in Tucker, she didn’t know what a sweetshrub was, let alone its botanical name.

Twenty-five years later, the girl from Texas who had never smelled a sweetshrub loses me as she rattles off the botanica familiaris of the dozens of plants in her own lush landscape. Today, she is a nationally award-winning garden writer who has authored four gardening books and hosted her own television show for CBS. She lectures throughout the Southeast, and teaches regularly at the Atlanta Botanical Garden. She’s toured gardens throughout Europe and all over the US.