Today we’d like to introduce you to Mary Carol Edwards.
Hi Mary Carol, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
I was a suburban Houston kid with a longing for wild natural places. Fortunately I had elder family members who still farmed in East Texas and Mississippi, and I could never get enough time exploring the woods and gardens. That should have been a big sign in my life, but I didn’t read it. Like a lot of people in their teens and 20’s, I got off track from the things that fascinated me as a child. I did go camping pretty regularly, but I was indoors the rest of my life. I studied biology but didn’t particularly want to be a microbiologist or do genetic studies, although lab work was about the only kind of biological work that I was aware of, and so I worked at Baylor College of Medicine and Rice University for a few years. I changed directions to study architecture while simultaneously raising my son, who was a toddler when I started. I can’t believe it now, but I persisted and did okay as a mom and a grad student. It wasn’t architecture, but landscape architecture, that was compelling to me. Through working with landscape architects (and starting my own landscape design firm at one point), I learned about the need for wetlands to be both preserved and created because they give such multi-functional benefits to people and the environment. If you don’t know, wetlands are an ecosystem that develops where the water and land intersect, and there are many kinds.
I had a lot of time to volunteer during the big recession in 2009 because no one was spending money on landscapes, and that’s where I got my feet wet literally with wetland restoration through a volunteer program run by Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service. I started as a wetland restoration volunteer and ten years later I was leading my own program, advocating for and demonstrating the use of stormwater wetlands to ease flooding and filter out contaminants. I loved hunting native wetland plants growing all around Harris County, and propagating them for our projects, like Exploration Green park in Clear Lake City.
I kept thinking that someone should start a nursery in Houston for native wetland plants, and eventually it became clear that I needed to be the one. I took the leap in 2018.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
I feel like this is a business that wanted to come to life, because in many ways the wind was in my sails. People who knew me from my work at TX A&M were ready to support me, whether it was providing a low-cost location for our first pop up nursery, donating tools, or connecting me with projects that needed native plants. But starting a new business is full of challenges. Entrepreneurs reading this will relate to the 14 hour workdays and living off your savings for a scary amount of time. I said goodbye to a lot of my possessions at The Guild consignment shop and Facebook marketplace in the early days! Then the next year there was the pandemic, but the upside was that the PPP and SBA loans helped us keep going and invest in our farm down in Alvin. So there have been challenges but there is nothing else that I would rather be doing. Finding people along the way that feel the same has been amazing.
Great, so let’s talk business. Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
Green Star is a woman-owned business providing locally-sourced native wetland plants for use in flood control basins, conservation and mitigation projects, treatment wetlands, green infrastructure, and landscape projects. You can see our plants in parks all around Houston: Memorial Park, Hermann Park, the Houston Zoo, and the Houston Botanic Garden to name a few. I don’t think there other businesses right now that do exactly what we do in Texas, but I believe that every region of Texas should have a company like ours. Our goal is to regenerate the beauty and function of wetlands for Southeast Texas and the Gulf Coast. We envision healthy, beautiful lands and cities revitalized by native landscapes, including wetlands and near-wetlands like rain gardens, ponds and lakes, bog filters, stream edges, dunes, and wet prairies.
Consultations are available for wetland site planning, plant selections, and plant management. We provide wholesale and retail sales by appointment at our farm in Alvin TX, 30 minutes south of Houston. In spring and fall we have Open Farm mornings one Saturday a month for retail sales. The dates will be posted on the website.
Can you talk to us a bit about happiness and what makes you happy?
My loved people around me make me feel happy of course, but I have another deep source of happiness. Wetlands support life, and seeing new life beginning to thrive just thrills me. Seeds popping up green shoots, dragonflies emerging from the water, a roseate spoonbill flying over, everything gives me so much satisfaction. One of my colleagues calls a visit to the water “pond therapy”. You can open your mind and get quiet and just watch and listen to the tiny dramas happening even in one square foot of boggy land. Whatever else is happening in the world, you got to see a tiny fish poking at a sparkly cicada wing floating on the water, something magical like that. I give it the highest recommendation.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://greenstarwetlands.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/green_star_wetland_plants/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/greenstarwetlands/
