Ross Collins with some easier-to-grow houseplants in a sunny west-facing window. He recommends a fast-blooming amaryllis for winter color.

Nancy Edmonds Hanson

When you’re raised by the woman who wrote a gardening column for more than 50 years, the passion for plants was bound to find a way of taking root.
How else to explain how Ross Collins – writer, photographer, author, teacher – blossomed into a garden columnist himself?
The title of Ross’s column in Extraordinary Living magazine sums up the “how” of the story: “The Accidental Gardener.” The NDSU professor of communication is the son of the late Dorothy Collins, whose weekly words of wisdom were weekly staples in the Moorhead Daily News starting in 1954. After its closure, they were transplanted to The Forum, where she covered Minnesota news until retiring in 1981. She carried on with her column, though, until two weeks before her death in 2008.
“When I was growing up, Mom had a huge garden all around our house,” the Moorhead native explains. “She’d employ me to do whatever was too hard for her to do, like digging holes, or that she didn’t want to do herself. I picked slugs off her perennials for 5 cents each.”
Growing up as the son of a Fargo-Moorhead garden luminary, Ross says, wasn’t always a pleasure. “She’d drag me to all the flower shows. When we went on vacation, we’d go to nurseries,” he remembers. “As a kid, I didn’t have a lot of interest in flowers.” He pauses, and adds, “As I’ve gotten older, I can see the value in it.”
Still, the plant life didn’t really grow on him … not until his first wife, the late Julie Poseley, surrounded their home with exuberant gardens of her own. Since her death 20 years ago, he says, “I’ve tried my best to maintain them.”
Like his mother, Ross is more a fan of gardens than of potted indoor plants. “Mom was an expert on lilies and roses,” he says. “She didn’t really like houseplants, even though she kept a light stand in our living room,” he remembers. “If they needed a lot of tending, they didn’t do so well with her.”
In her 2012 book, “Flowers Between the Frosts: How to Grow Great Great Gardens in Short Seasons,” Dorothy explored the challenge of growing outdoors in a climate endowed with hot, dry summers and brutally cold winters. But she, like Ross, did turn to houseplants to nurse her through winter, along with the seed catalogs that kept her going through the worst of it.
Today her son has followed her lead. He’s been writing his “Accidental Gardener” column for the past five years, and the home he shares with wife Kanako, surrounded by the outdoor gardens he prefers, harbors a year-round houseplant jungle of his own . “I have quite a few, even though I keep trying to have fewer,” he admits. His approach, though, mirrors his mother’s tendency toward species that tolerate benign neglect. “I try to keep mostly succulents and others that like being dry,” he points out.
As for his wife: “Kanako knows nothing about gardening,” he confides. “But she does like to eat our vegetables in summer.”