PANAYOTI KELAIDIS

Rocking on!

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PANAYOTI KELAIDIS is a lifelong Colorado gardener who has worked at Denver Botanic Gardens for more than 40 years. Known for his expertise in rock gardening and alpine plants, he is a longtime member of the North American Rock Garden Society. This interview took place during a society conference at Cornell University in June 2022.

SCOTT BEUERLEIN: Tell me a little bit about how you got started in horticulture.

PANAYOTI KELAIDIS: I have to kind of blame my parents, because they were very keen vegetable gardeners. It was maybe a thousand square feet and they grew a lot of things that you couldn't buy in grocery stores back then, Greek greens especially. I remember thinking it was really weird that they were out there all the time. We lived in Boulder, Colorado, which is a nice town, but our house was ornamentally threadbare and I thought that we could have a nicer yard, so I wanted to grow some flowers.

But what really did it for me was my brother-in-law, Allan Taylor, who married my sister when I was eight years old. He was a passionate gardener. And because he was an Anglo and my parents were these foreigners they were chubby and short with accents and he was tall and spoke English natively-and so I idolized him because he was kind of like a second father in a way because, you know, my real parents weren’t quite good enough for me back then.