Hannah Kegley is fascinated with plants. It’s something she realized as early as the first grade, when she decided to chop up a water lily for a school project and examine all of its parts. Since then, the young woman’s passion and curiosity have grown to the point that she envisions studying and researching the pharmaceutical applications of native and indigenous plants of South and Latin America .
The 18-year-old senior at Lyme-Old Lyme High School , who has been accepted by Smith College in Northampton , Mass. , to study biology and natural sciences next fall, has been selected by the Duck River Garden Club to receive a $1,000 scholarship.
The club established the scholarship in 1980 to be awarded to deserving candidates who reside in Lyme or Old Lyme and plan to continue studies in horticulture, environmental sciences, or a related field. Three candidates applied for the scholarship this year. The club raises funds for the scholarship through its annual spring plant sale.
Kegley was recognized at the garden club’s May meeting as her parents, Mary Talbo and Ben Kegley, and brother Justin, 15, looked on. She has three brothers, Justin, 15, Trevor, 13, and Owen, 3, and two sisters Meredith, 10 and Jess, 7. The family lives in Lyme.
“Hannah strikes me as one of the most promising young scholars I have met in my 10-year teaching career,” wrote Nicole Breault, a social studies teacher at L-OL High. She likened Kegley’s intellect and mature, tireless approach to academic work to that of a graduate school student.
In fact, Smith College has selected Kegley to be a faculty research assistant, a plum assignment usually reserved for upperclassmen and graduate students. She will get to choose an area of research, something she said most students don’t get to do until graduate school. The paid position, grants, scholarships, and hard-earned money make it possible for her to attend the college.
“Botany has always been of interest to me, ever since elementary school,” said Kegley, who excelled at biology as a freshman and took Advanced Placement (AP) biology her sophomore year. She was named to the National Honor Society her junior and senior years and will be graduating with a 99 grade point average.
“I couldn’t do the dissections of animals in biology,” she said, deciding hands-on work with species in that kingdom wasn’t for her. The oldest of her siblings, Kegley has balanced her family responsibilities, including working in a vegetable garden, with academics, sports, and music and earning money by working for a handful of neighbors.
Her father, Ben, who is a stonemason, majored in renewable natural resources in college and has contributed to her interest in doing things outdoors. Reading is a favorite pastime and she enjoys writing, both influenced by her mother’s college degree in English.
Her latest curiosity about plants in the past year has extended to native and indigenous plants of South America , including pharmaceutical applications. She said she was looking for ways to use her AP Spanish language studies plus build on her reading of works by South American authors.
“I know that there are lots of indigenous people in the reaches of South America , and no one really has tapped into the resources,” she said. “They’ve been doing things like this for thousands of years and must know something about plants we don’t even know about.”
She has been practicing her Spanish with some of her father’s native-Spanish speaking co-workers and working on losing her American accent.
Kegley is looking forward to bringing all of the pieces together this summer—language, culture, and medicine— when she goes on a medical mission trip to the Dominican Republic with her church, the East Haddam Congregational Church.
When she toured Smith College , she said she immediately fell in love with the greenhouses.
“They have the most fantastic greenhouse of all the colleges I visited. They have a different section of selected plants from each continent,” she said. “There was this gigantic display of the banana plant and its role in Latin America , which is exactly the kind of studies I want to do.”
In addition to the biology of tropical crops such as bananas, the cocoa tree, coffee beans, and sugar cane, Kegley is interested in the larger societal, economic development, and international trade implications and impacts on the lives of the people who work on the plantations.
Kegley’s teachers commended her for managing her time well and contributing to everything she does, whether it is studies, sports, music, or other volunteer activities and work. She has played basketball since the second grade and rows in the L-OL crew three seasons of the year. Crew was something she took up to stay in shape for basketball, but it is by far her favorite sport. She also plays clarinet in the school’s wind ensemble.
“Her remarkable academic abilities represent only a portion of what she will contribute,” wrote Sheila McTigue Ward, her L-OL High School science teacher. “She will also bring a tremendous work ethic, unquestionable integrity, and a genuine desire to improve the world around her.”
In the past six years, Kegley has worked for eight to 10 neighbors, all within bicycling distance, doing lawn, yard, garden, and outdoor work. She credits neighbor and family friend Roz Christison, in particular, and her unique gardens for being the biggest horticultural influence.
This summer, she is applying to work at local independent garden centers and will continue to do yard work and gardening for residential clients.