Daisy (Goldschmid) Unsicker was born in 1976 on Daigle Road in Westminster where her mother Raine Kaine (her father is Tom Goldschmid) had planted lovely perennial beds all around their home. Even before Daisy started first grade at the Westminster West School – where Claire Oglesby and this writer's wife, Mary Hayward, were her teachers in grades 1-4 – she helped her Mom with flowers as well as their family's large vegetable garden.
"I guess my parents could be called 'back to the earth folks – growing, canning, freezing.'" (She told me this as she ate her homemade soup from her last summer's frozen vegetables). We were sitting mid-April in the kitchen of Jack and Karen Manix at their Walker Farm in Dummerston where Daisy works from March to November.
After Westminster West School, Daisy attended The Grammar School in Putney for grades 5-8, then Putney School for grades 9-12 "and then I went to UVM to become an ESL teacher. That plan changed when I took a Botany class in 1996 and loved it.
"That summer both my brother Alec (now a dry-stone waller) and I worked at Walker Farm. I worked in the stand selling fruits and veg. Then I met and talked with Amy-Melissa, a fellow worker and flower specialist, and she got me learning about garden plants and I haven't stopped since. After that season at Walker Farm, I returned to UVM and took only horticulture classes that second year. I left UVM in 1997. I knew then plants were my future."
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