Ann King Filmer has been on the Arboretum Friends Board since 2012, serving as secretary for four years. In 2019, she joined the Arboretum’s Nursery Caretakers team as a volunteer.

Her interest in plants started in early childhood, helping her father every summer with his vegetable garden. That spurred a lifelong interest in plants — she earned a B.S. in horticulture at Pennsylvania State University, where she learned to take field notes using pencils, because pens freeze in winter.

Ann then migrated west to California in a rickety VW bug (which broke down only once – in Wyoming), and earned an M.S. in environmental horticulture, and a Ph.D. in plant physiology, both at UC Davis. Back east to Florida in a just-slightly more reliable Mazda, for a two-year postdoc on postharvest citrus chilling injury with the USDA, then a return to California.

She then spent 17 years as an environmental horticulture advisor with Cooperative Extension in Half Moon Bay, working with the floriculture industry on postharvest handling and pest management. The next 16 years were back at UC Davis, using her plant science and outreach expertise as director of communications for the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, then the Department of Plant Sciences, from which she retired in 2020.

Extracurricular activities include serving on the board of the Davis Farmers Market (since 2010), and being appointed to two statewide CDFA committees — Organic Products Advisory Committee, and Farmers Market Advisory Committee.

Favorite Arboretum plant: Aside from adoring almost every plant (most recently Blue hibiscus, Alyogyne huegelii) Ann is endlessly amazed that something is abloom every day of the year. Having been born in a fierce mid-winter snowstorm in Pennsylvania, and raised therein, after 40 years in California, she still goes outside in Davis every January, and whispers aloud, with awe, “Wow, flowers in January.”