Glenn Stokes’ passion has brought him around the world and back for years and it’s a love he’s passed on to his daughter.

Sondra, Glenn’s daughter, works together at their family plant nursery, Stokes Tropicals, a place where plants are propagated and grown to usable size.

Clients include retail nurseries that sell to the general public, wholesale nurseries which sell only to businesses such as other nurseries and to commercial gardeners, and private nurseries that supply the needs of institutions or private estates.

But Glenn and Sondra weren’t the first Stokes to show a love for plants. Glenn’s great-great-grandfather Sam Stokes came from Scotland and Ireland and settled down between Forest Hill and Lecompte in Rapides Parish.

“The Strokes were the first nurserymen in Louisiana,” Glenn said.

Glenn described his grandfather as different, a man of few words. His only memory of the Stokes patriarch was when he was 5, and his grandfather died shortly after.

But while he had few memories of his grandfather, Glenn said Sam started growing plants in 1898 and would sell them shortly after, much to the chagrin of the other Alexandria residents.

“They would call him a crazy old man,” Glenn said. “He would wander in the woods all day looking for plants then he would grow them and sell them.”

One of Sam’s biggest discoveries was a pink dogwood flower, also known as a Cornus florida. Typically a dogwood is white but one happened to mutate in a swamp 5 miles from where he lived.

“He grafted this (the pink) to the dogwood so that is the origin of all of the pink dogwoods all around the world,” Glenn said.

Grafting is a technique that joins two plants into one. In general, a wound is created on one of the plants, and the other is inserted into that wound so the plants’ tissues can grow together.

Glenn said that when he was growing up he would hear stories about his grandfather Sam and wanted to follow in his footsteps.

“It was only natural that I grew up appreciating plants,” Glenn said. “It was all they talked about. I remember sitting at our fireplace and my uncles would say, ‘As far as I am concerned, the best plant was … so at an early age I fell in love.”

That family love for plants followed Glenn, who became a medical entomologist at Southwestern Louisiana Industrial Institute, known as UL Lafayette today.

And from SLI, Glenn moved to the University of Nebraska for a year then earned a master’s degree at Harvard .

Glenn would then go to Florida, earning his doctorate in medical entomology sanitary engineering.

“I moved to New Iberia in charge of mosquito control as a contractor,” Glenn said.

Though he had a job that he loved doing already, there was always something that was pulling him back to his first love :plants.

And while his roots were here in the Teche Area, Glenn wanted to see the world and the plants that were on it.

From Columbia to Singapore and even Haiti, his favorite place to visit, Glenn always enjoyed the adventure with his family and the nurseries around the world. It’s something he’ll never forget.

On one trip, Glenn said he wanted to find more information on a particular plant but none was available. It became the start of a lifelong quest to find and discover as many plants as he could, leading him to create the first catalog in the world with both a genus species and a common name.

“Every plant deserves a common name and a description,” Glenn said.

And that first catalog in 1996 started what would become his 25-plus year journey.

“It was all due to plants,” Glenn said.

Sondra didn’t have that passion for plants at a young age, but eventually fell in love with plants, some 30 years ago.

“I think I inherited his passion,” Sondara said. “My favorite thing to do is plants. It comes kinda natural.”

Sondra wouldn’t call her work and passion “easy” but she would say it’s fulfilling when she’s able to lay out a plant, make a person happy or give them the information they need to grow it.

“It’s a passion but I just love the way they look, the way they fulfill your emotional needs for beauty,” Sondra said.

Glenn said it isn’t a surprise his

daughter found a love for plants because he was the same way his whole life.

“If she was around me … everything she would do was in contact,” Glenn said.

Glenn sees himself always trying to discover the next big plant and has no plans to stop anytime soon.

“It’s never going to end,” he said, “because when I see a new plant or something I am going to want to know its history, who collected it, where did it grow.”

Looking at books on plants for days, Glenn said there is no end for him and it will always be a challenge.

“New plants, new adventures,” Glenn said.

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