Utah expert gearing up for another season of bringing Joy to the garden

During her 30-plus years as a gardening teacher, landscaping consultant and radio host, Joy Bossi has given advice to thousands of Utahns on the best way to prune trees, grow vegetables, select plants, wrangle weeds and deal with bad bugs.

It's her entertaining, down-to-earth style that plants seeds of excitement in backyard gardeners.

"I've always had this feeling around plants, especially trees, that I'm spiritually connected to them," she said.

At 67, Bossi is semi-retired and works a schedule that mirrors the gardening season. After a relaxing winter, she kicks into gear the first week of March and doesn't stop until fall.

This week she will once again be a presenter at The Salt Lake Tribune Home and Garden Festival this weekend at the South Towne Expo Center in Sandy. She'll be talking about pruning Friday and Saturday on the Garden stage. (See box for details.) Her advice will be different this year, thanks to Utah's record warm winter. "We didn't have snow this year," she said, "which changes things."

Bossi is not one to stand onstage and lecture, explained Brooke Peterson, the festival manager. Her teaching style is hands-on — walking around with branches and showing homeowners where to make the kindest cuts.

"People love her and feel like her advice is so valuable," Peterson said. "She's so knowledgeable about our climate and what plants work best here."

Also on Saturday, Bossi's "Joy in Your Garden" radio show begins its 2015 run. The show, where amateur gardeners call in and ask questions, airs every Saturday from 8 to 10 a.m. through October on KLO-1430 AM.

"Joy knows how to relate to people and doesn't talk above their heads," says fellow gardener Reid Baumgartner, who hired Bossi to work at the now-closed Redwood Nursery in the 1980s. "She's down to earth and explains things in a way an ordinary person can understand."

Seeds of inspiration • It's not quite the path the Utah native and Kearns resident thought she'd follow.

"I had my eye set on being a junior college science teacher," said Bossi, who initially attended the University of Utah. While sitting in a beginning botany class taught by beloved professor Seville Flowers, the feeling that she had found a place began to take root.

"The way he spoke about plants, especially flowers, inspired me," she said. "He spoke about them like they were little people."

At the time, the U. didn't offer a degree in botany, so Bossi transferred to Brigham Young University in Provo.

She later met and married her husband, Joseph, and had two children, but at age 30 became a widow.

A certified master gardener, Bossi started working at Redwood Nursery eventually giving classes and helping Wasatch Front customers select plants that adapted well to Utah's high-desert climate.

Her media career started by chance, when then-Channel 2 meteorologist Rebecca Reheis began using the Redwood nursery for on-air gardening spots. One day Reheis asked if one of the employees would come on camera to answer questions.

"Everybody else took a step back," Bossi remembers. "I decided that if it didn't work, I would only have to do it once."

But her easygoing personality connected with viewers. She continued to host the short on-air gardening spots even after Reheis (now Rebecca Kolls) left Utah for a job in Minneapolis. Through the years, as ownership at the local news stations changed, Bossi also switched channels.

Growing listeners • In the late 1990s, she began hosting a gardening radio show on 570 AM that lasted some 20 years. Three years ago, she switched to KLO.

Matt Webb, KLO's general manager, said when Bossi started in 2013, her show was just one hour. But loyal listeners and advertisers grew and the station decided to extend the show to two hours.

"Joy has helped us grow some station loyalty," he said, noting the broadcasts that Bossi does at garden shops and nurseries are especially popular.

Bossi is also an author. In 2012, she co-wrote, with Karen Bastow, "The Incredible Edible Landscape," which offers suggestions for incorporating vegetables and herbs into flowerbeds and landscaping.

While Bossi is serious about gardening and helping beginners, she considers herself just as much an entertainer as educator. Like when listeners ask: "How can you tell a good plant from a weed?" "Pull on it," she jokes, " and if it comes out of the ground, it's a good plant."

"It's just the way I think about plants," she said. "Gardening can be funny and sometimes you end up doing funny things."

Besides, she said, "I think people learn more if they are smiling."

One of the perks of semi-retirement, said Bossi, is spending more time in her garden.

"When I was working at the nursery and consulting I was never home," she said. "But since cutting back I've installed a sweet little water feature in my yard and a new deck."

She still finds herself taking classes and reading books to improve her skills.

Working with amateur gardeners "keeps me alive and young and connects me not only to the Earth and its richness, but it connects me to the best people on God's Earth."

kathys@sltrib.com