by Sandra Hutchinson

I’ve long been a fan of native Arkansan P. Allen Smith, who first achieved widespread fame with his PBS television shows P. Allen Smith’s Garden Home and P. Allen Smith’s Garden to Table. He’s a garden designer, horticulturalist, conservationist, lifestyle influencer and book author, and as I recently discovered, a really down-to-earth and friendly guy. (Full credit: this photo is from P. Allen Smith’s website.) By the way, he goes simply by “Allen.”

This March, I met up with my midwest-based sister, niece and grand-niece, for a mini-family reunion in Little Rock. The centerpiece event of the long weekend was visiting Allen’s Moss Mountain Farm, about 45 minutes outside of Little Rock, where we helped celebrate Allen’s 65th birthday (along with many other people who had bought tickets) with a lunch, and a tour of Allen’s home and the farm. As if visiting the farm and meeting Allen wasn’t enough, we actually stayed in his former home in Little Rock where he filmed his Garden Home TV show, which is now rented out by its current owners as an Airbnb.