Go past the Quaker meeting house, cross the bridge over the creek, drive up the hill, turn by the large oak tree and follow the dirt road to the barn."

These are directions to what was once a working farm with corn fields, beef cattle, vegetable gardens and orchards in the rolling Pennsylvania countryside. Owned by Barry Yinger, AG '83M, a graduate of UD's Longwood Program in Ornamental Horticulture, the farm today is home to exotic plants from Asia and rare native plants from the United States.

Iris, wild gingers and jack-in-the-pulpits from Japan thrive with Korean camellias, American spring phlox, lady slippers and neviusia, a white feathery shrub from the South, while cacti and succulents sun on top of a stone wall near the barn. An assortment of containers and tubs house a variety of colored foliage plants from Asia.

Yinger, the new products resource manager for Hines Horticultural Inc., a large wholesale company based in California, discovers, imports and then tests and evaluates new plants at his farm. Part of his job is negotiating U.S. patent rights with foreign nurseries.

During his career, he has introduced several new plants to this country, including hosta yingeri, which was named in his honor. Other introductions include a Japanese hydrangea, named Moonlight because of its pale green, luminous leaves; a sedge plant christened Sparkler because of its starburst of green leaves edged with cream; and a towering Korean angelica, which produces purple-black blooms.

Yinger has logged more than 40 trips to Japan, worked in Korea for two years, traveled to Taiwan, Singapore, Pakistan, Indonesia and India and is now planning trips to South Africa and mainland China in search of new varieties of plants, many of which are related to their North American cousins.

He also operates a small mail order micro-nursery of woodland plants for collectors, called Asiatica.

Yinger grew up on the farm he bought in 1993 from his parents, who still live in the farmhouse. The farm has become his home and the hub of his work and travels.

Yinger's living and working quarters are in the renovated barn, which was falling down when he bought the farm. Its restoration has been a labor of love, full of headaches and hard work. He first restored part of the ground floor to serve as his living quarters. In later alterations, he installed a spiral staircase to link the three floors of the newly remodeled wing, which houses his office, a library and bedroom and bath in what used to be the hayloft. As much as possible, he has maintained the original old beams and other features of the barn, which overlooks the garden and the meadows and ponds beyond.

As a boy, Yinger and his two sisters worked with their parents on the farm. He also would visit his grandmother, Elsie Mummert, an ardent gardener with a profusion of plants and grasses growing in her Victorian garden in Altoona, Pa.

But, the turning point in his life was as a junior high school student helping a local woman with her gardening. When Miss Lena retired from her state job, she built a home and hired a landscape architect from California-a move unheard of in central Pennsylvania. According to Yinger, gardening at that time was mostly a matter of passing around packets of seeds and planting evergreens.

"It was an exotic garden and a revelation to me," he recalls. "I remember asking what a tree was and was told it was a holly. How could it be a holly without spiny leaves? The answer was that it was a Japanese holly, quite different from the American holly I knew."

Working with the main gardener under Miss Lena's direction taught Yinger basic gardening skills, such as taking cuttings and knowing when and how to divide iris.

As an undergraduate at the University of Maryland, Yinger pursued studies that combined horticulture, botany and Asian languages. "At first, like most freshmen, I wasn't sure what I wanted to do. I kept getting the advice that 'you can't earn a living in plants,' but I had two brilliant professors, William Stern and Robert Baker, who inspired me. Suddenly, it was like a laser beam. Ignore what anyone says and do what you really want to do," Yinger recalls.

A semester abroad in Kyoto, Japan, cemented his goals. "There is a tradition of a strong, intimate relationship between people and plants in Japan. I visited old and modern Japanese gardens and met serious plant collectors, botanists and other professionals, many of whom I still know today." Yinger says. He also become more fluent in Japanese-a big advantage in his career, as it has given him entry into the world of Japanese horticulture.

After graduating, Yinger worked in commercial horticulture and became acquainted with William H. Frederick Jr., who chaired Longwood Gardens' board of trustees. Longwood supported Yinger's first plant-collecting trip to Japan in 1976.

Yinger's career then took another turn, and he became interested in public horticulture. "The best and most respected credential in the field was a degree from UD's Longwood graduate program. Not only did I learn a lot, but Longwood provided me with opportunities to meet professionals in the field, who swarmed there from all over the world," he says.

After completing the program in 1979, he worked for Carl Ferris Miller at the Chollipo Arboretum, which Miller was creating in Korea, and then was curator of Asian collections for the U.S. National Arboretum in Washington, D.C.

While many of the plants Yinger imports and tests are from nurseries, many others are collected from the wild. For example, while in Korea, he was able to arrange a trip on a patrol boat, which visited islands off the northwestern coast, where he collected several specimens. One of his finds was a hardy camellia that survived the cold Korean climate. He collected the seeds and cultivated the plants, which he is now testing.

"Camellias cannot be raised in northern climates, but this one withstands Pennsylvania winters, so it's a real breakthrough with much potential," he says.

Then, another turnabout occurred in his career. Commercial gardening was becoming more sophisticated, and people were becoming more interested in unusual plants. "I looked over the fence again, and changed from public to private horticulture. At that time, I was consulting for Hines, and they offered me a job in California. I had just bought the farm, so moving to the West Coast was not an option, but they were flexible and allowed me to remain in Pennsylvania and travel to their major sites and on trips abroad from here," Yinger says.

One of his responsibilities is to predict trends in gardening. Yinger was one of the first to recognize the interest in grasses and plants with variegated foliage. Currently, there is a growing interest in unusual, compact plants for older people who still enjoy gardening but on a smaller scale, he says.

"It's been a fulfilling trip," Yinger says. "I've come full circle in my life and career, back to the farm where I was born, doing what I enjoy most."

-Sue Moncure