By Susan Clotfelter The Denver Post May 27, 2012 Sarada Krishnan, director of horticulture at the Denver Botanic Gardens, holds coffee tree leaves she collected recently from a trip to South Sudan to study the DNA of the plants. ( Cyrus McCrimmon, The Denver Post ) Coffee didn't alter the direction of Sarada Krishnan's life. It merely flowed through it. She was a year into her Ph.D. at the University of Colorado at Boulder, focusing on Prunus africana , an endangered tree in Madagascar. After a year of toil reviewing all the previous research, she found out the grant she'd been hoping would fund her project had been given to another scholar. "I was devastated," she said. "After a year of working on it, I had to completely start over." She opened a book, and a photograph fell out. It showed her late father, standing in the trees of her family's coffee plantation in the Wynad district of Kerala, an Indian state. "I ...