conference
Speaker Bio
Paul Tukey founder of People, Places & Plants Magazine and safelawns.org
America's reigning Gardening Communicator of the Year, Paul Tukey is the founder of SafeLawns.org, an international coalition of for-profit and non-profit organizations promoting environmentally friendly lawn care and resource conservation. Paul is well known to millions of Americans through his popular gardening program People, Places & Plants on HGTV and through his magazine of the same name. He brings many years of experience in both journalism and gardening to the SafeLawns.org campaign.
He was introduced to gardening during summers spent growing vegetables at his grandparents’ dairy farm in Maine. After graduating from the University of Maine with a degree in Journalism, Paul spent nearly a decade as a reporter and editor at the Maine Sunday Telegram and Portland Press Herald. In the late 1980s Paul followed his love of the outdoors and founded his own landscaping company. Like most commercial landscapers of the era, Paul used conventional techniques and supplies. But in the early 1990s Paul started hearing about the links between 2,4-D, a synthetic weed killer, and numerous illnesses including cancer. Then his personal physician suggested that his recurrent headaches, nosebleeds and blurred vision were attributable to exposure to those same chemical weed killers. His transformation to organic gardening and building healthy soil was underway.
In 1995 Paul founded People, Places & Plants magazine and the HGTV show followed in 2002. In March 2006, Paul won the highest honor in gardening journalism and broadcasting when the American Horticultural Society named him the winner of the annual Horticultural Communication Award. He is the author of a book on organic lawn care due out from Storey Publishing in early 2007 and has won numerous awards for his writing. He is also a frequent public speaker on organic gardening, photography and environmental awareness.