When Art Tucker begins talking about plants, it's like a dam has broken. Torrents of facts, maelstroms of science, and tsunamis of obscure foreign phrases rush from his mouth in a deluge of words that's often too quick to follow. The man just knows so much. And the sprawling garden that surrounds his house is a living, blooming library of his gardening knowledge.

One of the country's foremost experts on herbs, Art teaches horticulture at Delaware State University in Dover. There he analyzes the essential oils in herbs and tries to figure out why and how they affect us. His inquisitive nature accounts for many plants, some comely and some weird, that you find in his garden. For example, Art grows greater celandine (Chelidonium majus) not because of its lovely yellow flowers, but because he discovered that the juice in its stems cures warts. He also cultivates Paraguayan sweet herb (Stevia rebaudiana) because its leaves contain a compound up to 300 times sweeter than sugar without any calories or threat of cavities.

Art also teaches a semester course in plant identification. You can't help but feel for his students when his garden becomes their classroom. Not only must they identify dozens of obscure roses, bulbs, and pass-along plants, but also, at any moment, Art might throw them a real stumper. For example: +Laburnocytisus, which is a bizarre combination of two different plants whose tissues grow side by side without exchanging genes. Perfect scores in this particular class are scarcer than sincerity in Hollywood.

Birth of a Gardener
Don't be surprised if Art bleeds green, because gardening is in his blood. "I've been interested in plants since I was a kid," he says. "My grandparents had big gardens, my father had a huge orchard, and my mother grew lots of flowers." Unfortunately, his childhood fascination with plants left less-gifted friends and classmates wondering if he was a bit loony. "I would take hyacinths I'd grown to show the kids at school and say, 'What's up with your gardens?'" he recalls. "More than once, the teachers screamed at the class, 'Why can't you be more like Arthur?' You can imagine what recess was like."