Randy Allen and wife Carolyn Martin Allen are the owners of a Level 4 Arboretum in White House, Tennessee. Together they work as a team to continue an ongoing free exhibit of trees and bamboos for those interested in touring the estate grounds. Randy is the founder and orchestrator of the Arboretum, creating a unique and quality collection of trees and bamboos. A methodical, yet seemingly random and natural layout is implemented, for the most part, with adequate spacing for full development of each planting.
Randy's "documented" history growing trees and bamboos goes back to the mid 1960's. Randy Allen has planted 4 arboreta, since he was 11 years old, in Nashville, TN. Since 1966 his tree and bamboo background includes studying, writing papers, recording data, drawing illustrations, taking hundreds of photos back in the days when every picture cost money, and many thousands of new-age electronic photos, writing a 270 page book as a child from 1967 to 1973 and published in 2017 as entitled "TREE NOTES From My Childhood", planting hundreds of trees, cutting and pruning trees, 200,000 sq. ft. of privet hedge topiary/trimming, 4 years of college courses in the forestry major, dabbling in landscape architecture, thousands of hours of landscaping work, studying & growing bamboos, utilizing bamboo for food and making hundreds of items such as flutes, furniture, necklaces, rings, fences, walking sticks, etc., & corresponding with the Smithsonian Institute in identifying bamboo species he has searched for and found growing across the state of Tennessee back in the 1970's. He was a member of the American Bamboo Society around its inception, and before that, from 1972 on, he was discussing and sharing findings with fellow growers in CA, AL, FL, GA, LA, TN, and Washington DC area. Randy was a Certified Arborist as determined by the International Society of Arboriculture for many years until retirement age. He passed the exam more times than anyone else in Tennessee.
