MY JOURNEY

Photo credit: Jane Sikorski Photography

Changing careers ultimately changed my life, the way I live, and the way I care about our environment.

I always knew I wanted to have my own business; I wanted to be creative and utilize my artistic sensibilities but I did not know where to start. I worked for an Interior Designer for a year and considered going back to school at The New York School of Interior Design, but when my son’s pre-school closed during covid, I took my three-year old son and 10-month old daughter out into the gardens at our home and began re-designing the spaces.

At that moment, I was grieving the loss of my father who passed away in October of 2019. Gardens have a beautifully spiritual way of putting oneself in the present. They also remind us that life starts over in the spring. Nature is a complex yet beautiful cycle, filled with grief, hope, joy and gratitude.

The first class I took at The New York Botanical Gardens was Landscape Design History. My teacher, Caitlin, was and is such a wealth of knowledge - I must have filled three notebooks during the course. I realized how much I love design, how connected I am to plants, and this ultimately gave me those “goosebumps” that led to my “AHA” moment. I loved my former profession: it was glamorous, exciting and allowed me to travel often. However, what I realized at this moment in my life was that I wanted to be remembered for something. I no longer wanted to promote a world of excess - I wanted to give back.

Among the first truly influential female landscape designers was Gertrude Jekyll, of the Arts & Crafts period (mid 1800s). Although she was not “formally trained” and therefore not “recognized” by the men that led the business at the time, she was incredibly well-educated, traveled and therefore influential for her design intuition and the gardens she created throughout England, including Hidcote, Munstead Wood and Hestercombe, among others. Her “partner in crime” was most surely Mr. Edward Lutyens, an architect known for his vast array of contributions including work on The Taj Mahal, to his design of the famous ‘Lutyens bench’. Says Jekyll in her book, “Wood and Gardens,” [The] “lesson I have thoroughly learnt, and wish to pass onto others, is to know the enduring happiness that the love of a garden gives. I rejoice every time I see anyone, and especially children, inquiring about flowers, and wanting gardens of their own, and carefully working in them. For the love of gardening is a seed that once sown never dies, but always grows and grows to an enduring and ever-increasing source of happiness.” - Gertrude Jekyll