Growing up, Ilene helped her mom tend vegetable and flower gardens—often a joint project between their mother and four kids, since her mom juggled three jobs and a busy household. While she didn’t learn everything she wanted back then, the spark for gardening was planted early. After accepting her first teaching job in Wyoming, she quickly learned that gardening here was very different from what she knew—gone was the rich black dirt and rain, replaced by sand, wind, and drought. She spent 20 years learning through trial and error before joining the Wyoming Master Gardener program in 2009. Even now, she proudly calls herself more of an "experimenter" than a master gardener. One unforgettable “experiment” involved planting flowers around trees her husband had carefully planted years earlier. Unaware of the risks to tree roots in Wyoming’s climate, she began cropping away—until her husband caught her in the act. She made it her mission to keep those trees alive, and despite everything, they thrived to their full life expectancy.