He is a member of the board of the Atlanta Botanical Garden and the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center. Lee May and his wife, Lyn May, executive director of an adolescent pregnancy prevention program, live in Atlanta and have a home and garden in the North Georgia mountains. Together, the Mays have five grown daughters. Their current house mates are two cats, Vincent and Buuud. Recently, I asked him via e-mail about his writing.
Writing is a solitary job.
Gardening is largely about making personal choices and taking personal action with a spade, but your writing about gardening is all about people. As we got to know each other through our shared love of digging in the dirt, I saw the power of gardening to bring people together. Focusing on these life stories, I hoped, would make my writing accessible to gardeners and non-gardeners alike. Your distinguished career as a hard news journalist must have prepared you in some way for your current work. The two areas of writing seem so different.