2017 ASHS Annual Conference

Neil Anderson grew up on a small Vermont dairy farm that instilled in him a love for plants early on. As early as five years of age, Anderson was interested in horticulture, botany, and floriculture—teasing apart flowers in his mother’s garden; by second grade he began hybridizing flowers and tracking the yearly winter survival of native spring ephemerals. To embark on his formal education, he studied Ornamental Horticulture at California Polytechnic State University (San Luis Obispo, CA), a B.S. program that emphasized active learning. After completing his B.S., he joined the floriculture breeding research team at the University of Minnesota, led by Drs. Richard Widmer and Peter Ascher. He studied garden chrysanthemum, focusing on flower color, faster breeding cycles, inbreeding depression and genetic load, receiving his M.S. (1985) and Ph.D. (1989) in Horticulture with minors in Plant Breeding. After graduation he became a flower breeder, potted plant product manager and new crop development specialist in private sector flower breeding with PanAmerican Seed Company. In this position he had the opportunity to work with world famous flower breeders, learn the intricacies of flower crop domestication, and negotiate the first-ever Convention on Biological Diversity-driven industry-government agreement to domesticate new flower crops and remunerate South African citizens.

His passions are flower breeding, conducting long-term, high-risk research and educating students. This led him to join the faculty at the University of Minnesota in 1999 to direct the Flower Breeding and Genetics program, which has a productive history of student education, research, and plant breeding since its inception in 1924. As an educator, advisor, and mentor he has had the privilege of positively influencing hundreds of undergraduate and professional students who are now in a variety of horticultural careers.

He has developed a research program in flower breeding and genetics to enhance cold tolerance to maximize herbaceous perennial plant survival, created novel ornamentals, and bridge knowledge gaps for informed decision-making in preventing invasive crops. This has resulted in the publication of 40 peer-reviewed publications by his research team in the past eight years alone. His research has led to the discovery of novel plant phenotypes such as winter-hardy, interspecific shrub chrysanthemums, groundcover garden chrysanthemums for use in containers and hanging baskets, winter-hardy gladiolus, and seed-propagated, reflowering lilies. He has bred and introduced a total of 35 cultivars and germplasm releases during his career, covering a wide range of floriculture crop uses