My interest in cycads began with many trips to explore, collect, and import cycads during the whole decade of the seventies. My lifetime friend and mentor Larry Bussell encouraged such trips and took me to such places as Mexico, Central and South America where we had constant adventures, some enjoyable and some not so enjoyable driving day and night on nearly impassable roads, exploring hard to get to jungles, climbing sheer cliffs on mountains while hanging on to cactus or a small shrub to keep from falling hundreds of feet to the Rio Grijalva, a raging muddy river that meanders through the State of Chiapas. Trying to deal with corrupt Mexican officials or often high speed vehicle chases seemed to be the normal routine on trips to Mexico. But, the payoff was the pleasure of seeing first hand the original habitats of many cycads and other exotic plants, many of which were unnamed at that time.

Flying in a small Cessna airplane into the interior of Honduras and being dropped off in the jungle near Olanchito was a true adventure, We collected dioon mejiae and zamia standleyi. The village of Olanchito is located in a valley between two mountains with no breeze and no electricity. I believe it was one of the hottest temperatures I've ever endured.
And near Puerto Limon Costa Rica, we followed creeks, stepping on such beautiful plants like calathea warszewiczii to collect zamia skinneri. Both plants were discovered by Jozef Warszewicz in the year 1850.
However, the best was yet to come that same year 1978 while exploring some extremely dense jungles in the country of Panama, my favorite.
After meeting Professor Dressler at the Smithsonian Institute located in Panama city, he was very kind and gave us a few locations for various plant species. Calathea Dressleri, anthurium Dressleri, zamia Dressleri, and others. We felt honored to at long last meet this interesting gentleman. So, we were off to explore for plants and later after getting into a little trouble near the Panama canal zone, we decided to go as far South until the road is no more and it is nothing but 300 miles of some the most dense jungles in the world all the way to Columbia. We had heard a story before leaving the U.S.A. that a crew of fourteen Yugoslavians had previously been in the area to determine the feasibility of building a road to connect Columbia but were unsuccessful and only twelve of them returned alive. However, at a location that I cannot disclose, we stumbled upon a giant form of what looked like zamia skinneri with red emerging leaves and each petiole being wider than my head. We thought we had found the long time elusive zamia wallisii that had not been seen since German botanist Gustav Wallis discovered this cycad during the year of 1873 supposedly in Columbia. We returned to Florida with 65 of these zamias from Panama.......see photo.
In 1984 and for the next 18 years I collaborated with John Aoki in building a large cycad nursery.

John wanted to be known for growing cycas revoluta that is indigenous to Japan, his native country. In addition, I was determined also to import seed of cycas taitungensis from China, a faster and much larger growing cycas species. I quickly learned there were many more attributes this plant had to offer. It is undoubtedly the most vigorous cycad species I have ever grown. After learning that seed was no longer available to import, I decided to plant 20,000 taitungensis as a large seed colony to produce our own seed in Florida. With the nursery being 240 acres, we decided to field grow large areas, pot thousands in all sizes of containers, plant huge seedling beds, and all total before long we had astronomical amounts of plants numbering in to the millions.  John Trademarked the plant 'EMPEROR SAGO' and to this day many nurseries, cities, and theme parks grow cycas taitungensis either in landscapes or for sale under a variety of names, sometimes to avoid the Trademark 'EMPEROR SAGO'.

As anyone that enjoys adventure and challenges, I dreamed, planned, and then took positive action on my dreams, to establish my own well diversified and stocked operation to make available some of the most beautiful and rare cycads in the world.

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