| BEGINNING WITH COLEUS
 Lowenfels and Hoersting first came to Alaska on their honeymoon in 1974 and soon returned, planning to stay five years.
"It was a different mind-set than we have now," Lowenfels said of the gardening scene. "People came up over the highway in their Volkswagen vans with all their records and hi-fi equipment and five or six plants they either had at their college dorm room or that were cuttings from their grandmother, and those plants were their family, their connection to the Outside. To lose one of those plants was a serious, serious problem."
So in the beginning, indoor plants it was. Their first year up here, Lowenfels actually had a little cultivation business going in his law office, growing coleus plants and selling them to Woolworth's.
The chance to do some serious outdoor gardening soon came, though, when a client at the firm where he worked said she was looking for "someone with a gardener's touch." Her husband had died, she'd moved away and she needed someone to care for their house.
That's how Lowenfels and Hoersting came to be the last to live in what's believed to be the first house built in Anchorage: the historic Oscar Anderson House, now a tourist attraction, on the edge of Cook Inlet.
They moved in and soon realized they weren't alone. As Lowenfels tells it, "We are the young couple referred to on the marker outside the building as having said it was haunted.
"All sorts of strange things happened. Lights would go on. Shades go up and down. Windows opened. Footsteps on stairs. Furniture would be blocking doors. Nothing serious. All friendly ghost stuff."
Lowenfels was thrilled to get his hands back into dirt. The gardening column came about a year later.
Back then, The Anchorage Times had the big circulation and the Daily News was the underdog, a seriously struggling one, while lawsuits over a joint-operating agreement gone bad got hammered out.
Lowenfels, an assistant attorney general at the time, became co-chairman of a group trying to keep Anchorage a two-newspaper town. He even sold Daily News subscriptions during his lunch break -- a couple thousand of them.
The Daily News' editor and publisher, the late Kay Fanning, was floored.
"She looked at me, she sat down, she said, 'What else can you do?' And like an idiot, I said, 'You know, I can write a garden column.' "
His column debuted Nov. 13, 1976. It was about Christmas cactus and poinsettias, and it was called "Petal Power."
To him, that sounded like a bicycling column. But he didn't complain. It wasn't like he was getting paid or anything. Not yet, anyway.
Week after week he'd bring in his columns, first handwritten, then typed on yellow legal paper. Suzan Nightingale ended up giving him one of the paper's office chairs as thanks for helping out.
"Some people frame their first paycheck. I sit on mine.
"So anyway, I wrote the column, and I figured, what the hell, you know? I mean, a couple, six months of this stuff and the Daily News will get back on its feet, everything will be hunky-dory and I'll go back to just practicing law and that will be the end of that. Next thing I know it's been a full year. Wooo. OK, so we celebrate."
As a way of thanking readers, Lowenfels arranged a special deal through an East Coast garden supply company for people to buy 100 tulip and daffodil bulbs.
"If we could get 100 people to buy these things, they'd give us this discount," he said. "And 1,700 people bought these packages.
The Lowenfels bulb deal turned into an annual plant-a-tulip program that brought 150,000 bulbs to Anchorage one year alone, winning him an Urban Beautification Award.
That was 1980, and he was just getting warmed up. That was before he discovered the Garden Writers Association and the Garden Writers Association discovered him.
Lowenfels went to his first meeting in 1982 and found himself sitting next to the garden writer for The New York Times. That's when he realized there was a lot more to this garden column thing.
He got on the board and eventually became president. For years he tried to talk the group into having its national convention here. But some felt Alaska was too far removed from the mainstream gardening community.
Wrong thing to say to Lowenfels. They came in 1994.
"He sells Alaska," said the association's LeGasse. "How do you know if Jeff Lowenfels is selling Alaska? He's talking. If he's talking, he's either talking about gardening or Alaska or gardening in Alaska.
"I'm surprised you haven't elected him to office."
Lowenfels arranged garden tours all over the city and up and down the highways. By all accounts, the event was a whopping success.
"Having done meetings for 30 years, when they're over, I'm ready to leave," LeGasse said. "When these meetings were over, I stayed another week. When that week was over, I still wasn't ready to leave."
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