Tyler Taylor, the Greenhouse Manager at the Memphis Botanical Garden, has prepared for this calling all his life.   He grew up crawling through his Grandpap’s blackberry jungle and hoeing weeds in his Peepaw’s giant tomato patches. During College, he spearheaded a 2-acre urban farm and community garden, developing his belief that “plants will truly save us all one day.”   He is fascinated, even passionate about the intricacies of soil ecology and the rhizosphere of plants, that environmental zone surrounding plant roots.  He traveled to Oregon to work with a cousin’s medical cannabis operation and learned firsthand about “playing nature” with sealed-off growing environments.  Around the Garden, he preaches, “Don’t cultivate plants, cultivate an environment for plants!”   In the greenhouse he is constantly cultivating that environment, through monitoring temperature and humidity, watering, propagating or dividing a diverse array of plants, checking on the beneficial insects he has released, shuffling plants around, and always noting the responses of different plants to environmental changes. At home, he tends a garden that fills his front yard, cares for his chickens, snuggles with his two dogs and cat, and talks the ear off his lovely wife about his passion for plants.