ABOUT joelle steele

and HORTICA PUBLICATIONS

Hortica Publications is one of several Web site businesses owned by Joelle Steele and Joelle Steele Enterprises, founded in 1983. Joelle Steele is a writer, artist, and publisher who has been selling her products and services online since 1994.

The mission of Hortica Publications is to consistently create and provide new, updated, and useful products, services, and informational resources specifically oriented to the needs of interior and exterior landscape companies and other horticulture-related businesses throughout the United States and worldwide.

The Landscape Industry

In 1979, Joelle Steele entered the landscape industry when she went to work for a landscape contractor in Santa Monica, California. Four years later, in 1983, she started her own business as an interior/exterior landscape designer and also began providing services to the horticultural industry.

Joelle Steele presenting a workshop hosted by Planter Technology (now Tournesol Siteworks) at their former location in Mountain View, CA.

Steele's business included consulting to landscape contractors, providing a horticultural employment referral service for interior and exterior landscapers in California (1983-1990), an interior/exterior landscape design service, photographing project portfolios for contractors, and running an independent quality control route for interior landscapers in Los Angeles, Riverside, Ventura, and San Diego counties (1983-1987). She spoke and lectured extensively at landscape conferences and in private venues throughout the English-speaking world on gardening and horticulture, as well as the business aspects of that trade (1983-1994), and she sold several different educational tapes for interior landscapers. Steele spoke at Career Days for the horticultural department at UCLA, and she became an instructor and co-coordinator of the Interior Landscape extension program at the University of California, Riverside (1985-1988), taught horticulture through adult education departments, and guest-lectured in horticulture classes at many community colleges and universities throughout the United States.

Joelle Steele, front far right, at a Board of Governors
Meeting in Miami, FL, for the former National Council
for Interior Horticultural Certification (NCIHC).

The New Leaf Press

Since she had a background in publishing prior to entering the horticultural industry, Steele founded Hortica Publications and Manzanita Books and began publishing books and an internationally-circulated monthly newsletter/magazine for interior landscapers called The New Leaf Press (1983-1994). As editor and publisher of The New Leaf Press, she was one of the first in the industry to publish the findings of Bill Wolverton's plants for clean air studies (1984), and she also interviewed and wrote stories about Wolverton and many of the early and renowned pioneers in the horticultural industry — including Alfred Byrd Graf, Julius Roehrs, and Robert Herrick Carter — which she published in The New Leaf Press. It was also during this time that she began writing and selling her landscape and interior landscape contracts as 3-part forms.

Writing and Publishing

In addition to her own publishing ventures, Steele was writing regular advice columns and feature articles for horticulture and gardening magazines such as Interior Landscape Magazine, Pro Magazine, Interiorscape Newsletter, California Landscape, GrowerTalks, GrowingEDGE, HousePlant Magazine, Landscape Ontario, Herb Quarterly, Landscape Contractor Review, Horticulture Review, and Canadian Gardening. She also had articles published on landscape- and contracting-related topics in such publications as Shopping Center World, The Docket, Michigan Lawyer's Weekly, Service Business, Property Management, Small Business News, and Cleaning Business. In addition, she authored chapters in books published by the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and wrote articles and did illustrations for the Interior Plantscaper newsletter. By 1992, four of her books for the horticultural industry had been published.

Joelle Steele speaking about the business of interior landscaping at the University of California, Riverside, CA.

eXPANSION & RELOCATION

In June 1997, Steele moved to Monterey, California where she turned her attentions to expanding her writing and self-publishing pursuits. An experienced legal writer, she had been writing contracts for the landscape industry and selling them as 3-part NCR forms since 1985. By 2002, she had written more contracts and had converted them into customizable Word documents. She also assembled her botanical clip art collection, and she sold everything via her Web sites (including the former Green Industry Publications). Then, in November 2005, she relocated again, this time to Washington state where she has written more books, expanded her contract templates catalog even further, and produced and marketed other products and services for the horticultural industry. In addition, she is a recently-retired residential landscape designer-consultant, teaches extension classes through local colleges, and also substitute-taught the interior landscaping and floral design course at South Puget Sound Community College in Olympia for the Winter 2008 quarter.

Joelle Steele at an interior landscape
trade show in Burlingame, CA.

Education & Achievements

Steele has a Bachelor's Degree in Language Arts (a double major in English and Linguistics) and Vocational Certificates in Interior Design/Space Planning and Ornamental Horticulture. She also has other acknowledgments and certificates, including: Who's Who Historical Society, American Biographical Institute's 2000 Notable Women, Professional Web Site Administrator Course, FrontPage Internet Administration Course, Professional Publishing Expert, Basic & Advanced Landscape Short Courses, Professional Horticulture Short Courses, Interior Landscape Maintenance Short Course, and Professional Landscape Design.