STEVE SOCIE has been gardening for 25 years, four of them at Seattle Center. He is from Michigan, where he got a degree in French “which was supposedly what I was going to do” and came to Seattle because “here you can garden year round.”
“You feel that what you do is really part of the community, so you feel that the whole community can really enjoy your work. It’s not just someplace for some lucky people. I like the way that it changes up, and there’s lots of things that I enjoy. I enjoy working on the turf with lots of different machinery, and I enjoy fussy work in the garden, where you’re pruning and making it perfect and beautiful. It’s great to be a part of the community, and it’s a good challenge and a constant learning experience. It’s an opportunity, because you’re working in one area, that you’re able to focus and say ‘I’m going to prune this shrub this way this year’ and then next year you can come back and say ‘wow, that looks fantastic’ or ‘oooh, not going to do that again.’ So that’s what I’ll say: community, learning, always different and challenging.”
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