Even as a child, Teresa Mazikowski would weed the gardens of friends and relatives. As an adult, her house was a jungle, but when this horticulturist started at the Buffalo and Erie County Botanical Gardens, she gave her houseplants away.

Now she's 43, and with four greenhouses to tend, she has the tropics at her fingertips — and rides roller-coasters for fun.

PeopleTalk: Roller coasters?

Teresa Mazikowski: I'm kind of a freak about it. A friend and I go to Cedar Point every year. They have 17 roller coasters. It's such a thrill. No matter what, you cannot hold on. One goes up 410 feet, straight up and down at 120 mph.

PT: Is Buffalo a good garden town?

TM: Because the season is so short, I think people try to make it extra pretty for that short time. I think a lot of people in Buffalo are into that, no matter what neighborhood you go to. The Garden Walk has some of the most amazing gardeners.

PT: What makes gardeners amazing?

TM: You deadhead, you weed, you repot. You need 100 percent patience, and the willingness to get dirty.

PT: Is it luck or skill?

TM: A bit of both, because I never really had any professional training in caring for tropical plants, but I've always managed to keep them alive. After I started working here — caring for plants all day — I gave a lot of my houseplants away. I have a degree in horticulture, but in Western New York, that really means landscaping.

PT: No thoughts to being an arborist?

TM: I don't like having down time. In Buffalo, you only work in the summer, and I'm not one to just sit. Working here, I feel like I'm in a tropical paradise.

PT: How does one become a master gardener?

PT: Does your home garden signal your personality?

TM: It's more of a simple garden, not something I wanted to show off to the world, but I did just put in 23 yards of dirt. I don't like clutter. I don't like extravagant things. If you walk through the gardens I take care of here, you would see they are simple. I love native plants. Bee Balm, or Monarda, attracts butterflies and bees.

PT: What's your signature plant or flower?

TM: I love magnolias, but Monarda is my all-time favorite. It's such a cool flower, and the way a bee has to get in there to get the pollen out, it's just amazing. It's more than just a pretty flower, and they don't talk back.

PT: Do you talk to them?

TM: Yes. I tell them how wonderful they're looking or if there's something wrong, that I need to fix it. Any talking is good because just breathing oxygen on the plant is good. That's why people talk to their plants.

PT: Tell me your idea for the perfect garden tool.

TM: It would be kind of like a spatula or shoe horn, and it would go around the edges of a pot when the plant is root-bound. It would somehow loosen the bottom, to free the plant from its pot.

PT: Gardeners get overwhelmed by catalogs this time of year. Are you drowning?

TM: No, I love every one of them. Now is the time we start thinking about what we'll do with the front walk. Plus, I can do tropical.

PT: What is a plant's best friend?

TM: Butterflies, bees, sometimes hummingbirds. We want native ladybugs. If you have aphids, ladybugs will flock in and clean up. I wish people would not buy ladybugs from catalogs, ever, because they're harvested from trees in their dormant season and thrown in bags. It interrupts their reproductive cycle, which causes us to have less ladybugs. We're getting more and more Asian ladybugs, the bright orange ones you find in your house in the fall. Those aren't good ladybugs. They're not taking care of the natural predators we have around here.

PT: Do you participate in guerrilla gardening, or adopting a public patch of land to make it beautiful?

TM: As a group, last summer we went down to the City Mission, and redid their whole front gardens.

PT: What is your least favorite garden resident?

TM: Slugs. They're slimy and gross. Every time I touch one, I still scream.

PT: What purpose do slugs serve?

TM: They don't. Well, they feed birds. With plants, their only purpose is to destroy. They eat the leaves, they are not good.

PT: If you weren't a horticulturist, what would you do?

TM: I will always be in this business. I've always been a bartender, too. Totally separate things. It's the interaction with people. I worked at Howdy's for four years, and I hate country music. It was just so much fun. I worked in a sports bar, got to throw a football with O.J. Simpson. That was cool then, but now it's scary.

jkwiatkowski@buffnews.com