Page 4 - Bella.June2017

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to meet and work with other gardeners from all across the state,” the recently named Arkansas Master Gardener of the Year, Barbie Luther of El Dorado, a Union County Master Gardener, said. She attended the State Master Gardener Conference in Little Rock in late May and received the honor.
“It was very exciting and a great honor,” she said after being presented the award by Janet Carson, state extension horticulture specialist with the University of Arkansas Cooperative Extension Service.
Born in Woodville, Texas, Barbie and her family moved to Chester, Texas, where she graduated from high school and then attended Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas, where she studied fash- ion merchandising.
She then moved to Beaumont, Texas and worked at Joske’s Department Store of Texas. After a year at that job, she started work at Gulf States Utilities in Beaumont and worked in the energy audits department “climbing in attics for a year and a half,” she laughed.
At Gulf States, she met her future husband, Bill Luther, who had grown up in Mena, attended the University of Arkansas, and has for a number of years served as customer service manager for the Entergy office in El Dorado. They met in February and were married the following Aug. 30, in Chester, “in the little church I grew up in,” she smiled.
Entergy later took over Gulf States during a merg- er and the Luthers then moved from Texas to Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
They lived in three places in Arkansas – moving three times in 38 months – to Forrest City, Vilonia and then El Dorado, where they have lived for the past 13 years – longer than any other city during their married life together. Before their move to El Dorado, the longest they had lived in one place was seven years.
When did she decide she wanted to become a Master Gardener?
When the Luthers were living in Vilonia, she was looking at a magazine and saw an article about a
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4 – June 2017 – BELLA