Each year, we host a Spring Soiree to recognize the remarkable achievements of our students, staff, faculty, alumni, and friends; this year Dr. Peter Konjoian was selected to receive the 2025 Department of Horticulture & Crop Science (HCS) Distinguished Alumni Award for bringing distinction to himself & the department at-large through his actions, commitment & leadership!
Peter studied horticulture with us here in HCS (twice!) and graduated with his MS in 1978 and PhD in 1982 before embarking on a remarkable career that shows no signs of slowing down. Today, he is President of Konjoian’s Horticulture Education Services. Take a walk down memory lane with Peter...
How’d you initially become interested in horticulture?
I grew up on a small family farm in Andover, Massachusetts. In the 1960s the area was quite rural and our side of town was populated with a half dozen family farms similar to ours. I feel fortunate to have inherited this life path but, to be clear, one does not have to be born into a family agriculture unit to develop a love of plants and choose to make a living growing them.
During grade school my dad and mom added a greenhouse to the mix and started raising ornamental crops to retail directly. They focused on popular spring bedding plant crops including geranium, petunia, marigold, and vegetable transplants for home gardeners. Along with these crops they chose to specialize in flowering hanging baskets that would be hung from porches, balconies, and lampposts. It was a brilliant commitment that eventually brought awards and national recognition to Konjoian’s Greenhouses. My very first year in grad school here at Ohio State my Masters advisor put me on the OFA Short Course program, today’s AmericanHort Cultivate program, for a presentation about my family’s hanging baskets.
As anyone raised in an agricultural operation experiences, I grew up with farm and greenhouse chores that developed discipline and work ethic that served me well throughout high school, college, and into adulthood. A huge amount of credit goes to my mom and dad; without their guidance and expectations I would not be who I am today.
How'd your time in HCS help prepare you for your career?
Graduate school at Ohio State was magical - I met fellow grad students from across the country and around the world. A handful of us have stayed in touch for the fifty years since we were students together, it’s been wonderful.
My path took me, a small-town New England farm boy, to a nationally renowned agriculture university and horticulture industry-leading graduate program. Does it get any better than that? I had the opportunity to learn from leaders including D.C. Kiplinger, my initial graduate advisor, Harry Tayama who took me on after Kip passed away, and George Staby who advised me through my doctoral program. All three were leaders in their areas of specialty, all three gave me invaluable guidance, all three opened doors I didn’t even know existed through my sheltered small-town upbringing.
What’s the rough career path that brought you to being the President at Konjoian’s Horticulture Education Services?
After graduating with my PhD in 1982 I joined the faculty of the Horticulture department at the University of Maryland. My wife and I spent two almost blissful years in College Park, Maryland that included having the first of our two children, buying our first house, and enjoying academic life after grad school as “grown-ups”.
I loved my academic responsibilities of teaching, research, and extension. My department chair assigned me to be the advisor to the Hort Club which remains a wonderful memory for me. That said, something about my childhood and farm upbringing tugged at me once I became a father. My wife grew up two doors away from our farm and both sets of parents still lived on our childhood road back in Andover. We shared a desire to bring our children up with their grandparents in their daily lives and I wanted very much to raise them in an agricultural environment because it provided me with excellent life tools and amazing experiences.
So, we packed up, left academic life, and moved back to Massachusetts where I took on managing the family greenhouse operation my parents had built into a sustainable, profitable business. Soon after, in 1986, we had our second child and moved into the house we still live in today, just shy of 40 years later.
Once I got settled running the family greenhouse operation opportunities appeared to serve the greenhouse industry. My connection to Ohio State and OFA were strong and it was fun and satisfying to accept committee assignments, conference speaking invitations, and author articles for OFA and national trade publications.
During these early years following the transition from academic to private sector life I also resumed research on a plant growth regulator that I had worked with in grad school. Something clicked with my ideas for researching this product, it was a compound that released the plant hormone ethylene after being absorbed by plant tissue following a foliar spray application. This research project soon took on a life of its own. Results were so compelling that growers were interested in learning almost as quickly as my research generated data. We were able to prove that ethylene was responsible for more than its classic triggering of fruit ripening and acceleration of flower senescence. It also stimulated lateral branching, inhibited internode elongation, and controlled a plant’s shift from vegetative to reproductive growth. I was able to harness all three of these effects to deliver excellent, profit generating results on a wide range of ornamental crops.
Successful research requires effective dissemination of results. Once the beneficial effects of applying ethylene to ornamental crops started rolling in I realized I needed to ramp up my outreach effort, my teaching. I decided to dust off my graduate training and concentrate on applying all of it to this project. With my wife’s assistance we self-published a newsletter that growers generously supported to keep up with what we were learning and help fund the ongoing research. It was a fascinating phase of my research career, one that I’m very proud to have undertaken. Along the way industry leading companies helped sponsor full day workshops across the country and Canada that growers paid to attend, all on this single, most simple molecularly structured (C2H4) plant hormone’s effects, ethylene. I reached 55 of these full day workshops, it was an incredible experience and proof that one does not have to be in academia to conduct productive research that helps growers become more profitable.
During this project I harkened back to my UNH years where weekday classroom learning was enhanced by weekend greenhouse work. Only now it was me feeling comfortable and confident running university quality experiments in my commercial setting. My academic colleagues around the country graciously embraced my work, never questioning but always accepting and supporting of what I was doing. For that I remain grateful, to this day. Dr. Garrett Owen and his graduate students are continuing to work with the same ethylene generating product I worked with, there’s so much more to learn and I’m excited that my junior colleagues are continuing the work.
It was in the early 1990s that all of this was happening and almost as soon as this project took off, I created my chapter S corporation Konjoian’s Horticulture Education Services to provide the structural platform from which to operate. It was important to me to choose the words purposefully, my name, Horticulture, Education, and Service. Remembering how much I loved my brief time as a university professor it was important to me to keep my name and work outside of being a commercial grower connected to teaching and research.
What’s a normal day look like for you and what do you most look forward to each day on the job?
While I was running the family greenhouse operation a normal day was quite full. Between all the chores and tasks of keeping everything humming I’d have experiments underway in various sections around the range, some funded directly by manufacturers whose products I was working with and others funded by fellow growers focused on the ethylene project.
These days things have slowed down quite a bit. My brother and I closed the family greenhouse operation a half dozen years ago after the passing of our parents. I was lost for a year until I realized I’d never not had a greenhouse in my life. So, I built a 1000 sq. ft. research greenhouse in my backyard and am enjoying it every single day. It’s even attached to the basement for easy winter access.
I’m continuing my private sector research work and also get to grow fresh vegetables and herbs year-round for my wife and I and our regularly visiting grandchildren. It’s so much fun and so, so convenient to be working here in my home office, think of a treatment that needs to be made to an experiment or picture that I’d like to take, leave the office, walk fifty feet, and be in the greenhouse. And if the digital picture doesn’t show exactly the angle I had in mind I just get up and go re-shoot. For someone who grew up with film photography, my gosh, we had to wait a week for the film to be developed to see the image. If it wasn’t perfect, too bad. By then the plants had grown and the shot was gone. 
How did you get involved with the D.C. Kiplinger Floriculture Crop Improvement Chair Committee at Ohio State?
During my service to OFA (the Ohio Florists’ Association) which Kip served as executive director of during his years on the faculty the Kip Chair Advisory Committee was one of several OFA committees I got involved with. Other committee assignments included Publications, Research, and Grower committee.
I was in grad school when the Chair came into existence and the first two visiting professors, Dr. John Seeley from Cornell University and Dr. Marc Cathey from the USDA each spent sabbatical years in Columbus as the first Chair holders. I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to interact with these two industry icons during their time at OSU. Over the years…no, decades, I enjoyed participating on the Advisory Committee and so far, haven’t worn out my welcome. Having been one Kip’s last pair of graduate students, my grad school mate was a young woman from Rutgers, I feel an obligation to keep voicing what Kip meant to so many of us. It didn’t matter whether you were a grad student or undergrad, grower, or colleague…working with him made us better. He recruited me to Ohio State, was an industry pillar, and left us too soon. I’m proud to serve on the Advisory Committee until, as I said, the time arrives to step back.
Any advice for students considering College?
If the opportunity is there to further your education, do it. You can always choose to do something else later but choosing to invest in yourself, in my opinion, is the best investment one will ever make. No one can ever take your education away from you, once earned it’s yours forever and works for you behind the scenes in ways you can never imagine while you’re in school.
Whenever I’m talking with young adults, I describe undergraduate and graduate programs as gradually intensifying levels of exercise for the brain. Undergraduate learning provides us with regular workout opportunities that teach us how to raise, organize, and apply our level of thinking. I’m not overly concerned about students changing majors and career interests with this belief. We benefit from building a solid ‘thinking’ foundation more than acquiring specific details about a profession. That’s not to say learning the specifics of a field of study like horticulture isn’t important, it is. But college provides valuable ‘reps’ needed as we learn how to think at a high level.
Graduate learning goes a step further by cranking up our cerebral workout intensity to ‘aerobic’ levels most students likely haven’t experienced. It was an amazing time of learning for me and I believe students who’ve earned advanced degrees will agree.
What was it like receiving the OSU CFAES Distinguished Alumni Award in 2006?
It was the most humbling experience of my professional career to be recognized at the college level twenty years ago. Of the awards and recognitions I’ve been fortunate to have received I’m most proud of that one. I’m repeating but…as a small-town rural farm boy having had the opportunity to earn my college’s recognition…it’s beyond my wildest dreams.
What are your thoughts on receiving the HCS Distinguished Alumni Award in 2025?
Well, twenty years after being recognized at the college level receiving this recognition at my department’s level is every bit as humbling. For anyone thinking that life and work have to stop at 65 years of age, think again. I’m 71 as I’m typing and many of my academic colleagues are retiring and asking “Peter, when are you going to retire?”. My response is why would I, I’m having too much fun to stop! As long as I’m healthy and have research ideas that could help fellow growers improve their profitability, why stop doing what I love?
It's an honor putting into words what my education in the Department of Horticulture and Crop Science at Ohio State means to me. My graduate degrees opened doors for me at the national level of our industry. They prepared me to make contributions at all three levels of service: teaching, research, and extension. My choice to build a private sector career after an enjoyable start in the academic world was made easier because of the industry-centric training I received. I hope I’ve been able to give back a fraction of what I received, Go Bucks!
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