Shepherd Ogden

Shepherd Ogden is perhaps best known as founder and president of The Cook's Garden, a mail order seed and supply house in Londonderry, Vermont from 1983 until 2003. The Cook’s Garden was a early leader in the marketing of certified organic garden seed in the United States and Canada.

His gardens and seed business were the subject of cover stories in Country Journal, Organic Gardening, The American Gardener, the Boston Herald Sunday and INC. magazines, and featured in Time, Newsweek, Forbes, Vermont Life, Victoria, Martha Stewart Living and Garden Design magazines as well as the New York Times, Newsday, Parade and USA Today. He has appeared on numerous foreign and domestic radio and television shows including NBC Today, CNBC Good Morning, and Martha Stewart Living as well as numerous cable venues.

He is the author of more than fifty magazine articles on all aspects of horticulture, agriculture and the environment. He was a Contributing Editor for Organic Gardening magazine, National Gardening magazine, where he was also Editor at Large, and Contributing Editor for The American Gardener, the magazine of the American Horticultural Society. His articles on gardening and environmental issues have appeared in those magazines as well as Garden Design, Horticulture, Country Journal, Harrowsmith, Martha Stewart Living, Country Living, New England Living, Eating Well and the Boston Globe.

In 1988 Ogden was a recipient of the American Horticultural Society's GB Gunlogson Award for "extraordinary and dedicated efforts in the field of horticulture" and has received numerous book and magazine writing awards. He has published five garden books: The Cook's Garden, Rodale Press, 1989; Step by Step to Organic Vegetable Gardening; and Step by Step Organic Flower Gardening, HarperCollins, New York, 1992 and 1995 (respectively), The New American Kitchen Garden (1997) and Straight Ahead Organic (1999). Freelance book and editorial clients have included Time-Life Publishing, Reader's Digest Books, the North American Outdoor Group, Sterling Publishing Co., and he was a correspondent to the Encyclopedia Britannica, where he wrote the Yearbook entry for The Environment: Gardening from 1995 to 2002.

He has lectured at botanical gardens and professional and amateur symposia in most regions of the United States. In 1995 he conducted a month long lecture tour of the Czech Republic dealing with sustainable gardening and agricultural practices under the auspices of Volunteers in Overseas Cooperative Assistance (VOCA / USAID) and in 2013 he conducted a similar tour of the Repulic of Belarus with the support of CNFA and USAID.

He has appeared on numerous panels including conferences at Cornell University and the Radcliffe Institute, and he has given lectures at the National Conservation Training Center, Yale University, Amherst College and public meetings in Vermont, New Hampshire, New York, Massachusetts, Ohio and California. In 2000 Ogden gave the keynote speech at the Northeast Organic Farmer’s Association (NOFA-VT) winter meeting “Seeds of Change: A Community Response to Biotechnology,” the keynote “Retaking the Genetic Commons – What You Can Do In Your Own Garden Or Farm” at NOFA-NY’s winter conference in 2004, and the 2006 annual meeting keynote at the Delaware Center for Horticulture, “Urban Agriculture – Coming Full Circle.” His paper “The Language of Biotechnology: Terminate or be Terminated” was published in the September 2002 issue of the journal Organization and Environment.

Recently he has expanded his writing interests to include "semi-historical" novels, the first of which is titled "Tattoo Charlie" and the second of which will be called "Chickenbone Blues." He is also working on another gardening book...the one his publishers would never buy.