Before Shea McGee moved into her home, she had a very specific dream: hydrangeas. Planted en masse and lining the front of the house in abundance. For someone whose entire creative life is built on translating vision into reality, this was never going to be just a passing thought.

Nearly seven years ago, when the interior designer and her family moved into their home, there was no established garden. Just potential. Shea, who describes herself as 'not a gardener' when she started, began creating the space from scratch. She approached it the way she approaches everything: with intention, restraint, and an eye for how the garden could become an extension of her interior design aesthetic.

Today, those hydrangeas (hydrangea paniculata 'limelight', to be precise) – that took six years to establish their current magnificent scale – line the front of her home just as she'd imagined. But they're only part of a much larger story about how a tastemaker's garden can become a laboratory for creativity, and a daily practice in understanding that a garden, like design itself, is always evolving.

Hydrangeas And What They Taught Me

When we moved into our home, I literally dreamed about having hydrangeas in front of it. They bloom in late summer, so I wait all year, and when they finally pop, they just kind of overtake our house.

Every single year when those flowers finally come, that gratification doesn't get old. And I think it's because I held that vision for so long before I actually had it. I knew exactly what I wanted, and now that it's here, it feels so fulfilling every single year that they bloom.

It took six years for them to reach the scale they're at now. Six years of patience, which is interesting because I'm naturally impatient, especially as a designer. I want things to look beautiful right away.

Now I have hydrangeas lining the front of our home, and I also have them in a small area in the back against our mudroom. They get so big they actually start to cover our windows, and I don't even care. I love it so much. Then I go out and just clip mounds of them.

This past year I dried some of the hydrangea stems and put them in our Christmas tree. I love that antique pink color they turn at the end of the season.

Creating A Garden From Scratch

When we built this home, I wasn't a gardener, but I had a lot of aspirations to become one. I loved the process of learning.

When we first moved in, I created the garden from scratch. I like a restrained palette: greens and whites, and lavenders. That really informed my planting decisions, as well as wanting the hydrangeas, roses and lavender that I clip from regularly.

As an interior designer, I'm always thinking about how the garden works with my home. I want to be inside and look out and feel like it's an extension of my style on the interiors. But also, I love hosting, and I want fresh flowers around my home. So those planting decisions were largely informed around what would be a natural fit in the interior design.

That first year of gardening, I was very nervous. Something about gardening feels intimidating when you don't know what you're doing. But once I just started, I realized I'm going to make mistakes and I'm also going to have beautiful discoveries every single year.

I think a lot of people hesitate to start a garden because they're afraid of failure. And that fear held me back when I was first getting into interior design as well. But then the exact same thing happened in both cases: I just started, I learned, and I became comfortable with the idea that it's okay for something not to work out.

The Designer's Approach

Because I'm impatient and I want something to look beautiful right away, I have a strategy.

When I'm planting my garden beds, I line all of them with little flowers; insect-repelling plants that look beautiful, such as petunias, things that are good right out of the gate.

That gives me that immediate visual impact I'm craving while I'm waiting for everything else to establish. It was wonderful to have a beautiful flower border trailing and spilling over from the very beginning.

Even the colors I choose carry my design aesthetic into the garden. If I'm going to do a marigold, I'm not choosing the vibrant orange. I'm choosing a soft yellow because that's my natural palette, and what I'm drawn to.

I do this on purpose now, but even when I wasn't thinking about it consciously, I was selecting colors and plants that felt aligned with my interior design sensibility.

However, when it comes to the actual vegetables in my kitchen garden, I'm not selecting based on color or design. I'm selecting based on what I actually want to eat and what I can use in my cooking.

The Kitchen Garden Inspiration

I knew I wanted to try my hand at growing food, so I built some raised garden beds, and that was the start. That first year I just went for it.

Now there's a clear path from my kitchen out to that garden. I really enjoy cooking, and I garnish everything with herbs. So herbs and vegetables live in that space, and they're constantly being used.

My new cookbook, Around The Table, available from Amazon, is deeply connected to what I grow. When I was approaching the book, I had a lot of discoveries about myself and how I like to cook. I realized that a lot of it is an extension of how I approach design.

There's something so special about being able to go out and snip fresh herbs and add them into salads. One of my favorite recipes in the book is a garden couscous salad just filled with dill and all sorts of fresh herbs from the garden.

But I also got creative with what I could grow and make. I have a bay leaf cheesecake recipe in the book, where I blend up the bay leaves into a really fine powder and sprinkle it throughout. It's herbaceous but sweet; a totally different way of thinking about a dessert.

Family Time In The Garden

We all have different jobs in the garden, different things we're paying attention to, but what I love most is that we're just occupying a space together outside.

My four-year-old spends the most time with me. She toddles around, loves to find the bugs and the earthworms and the snails and slugs. She's curious about all of it. She spends a lot of time just at my heels.

My older children approach it differently. They'll say, 'This is my cucumber', or 'this is my tomato'. They claim plants. They want to check on that one specific plant, and they take great care of it. They love to harvest, even if it means picking carrots way before they're ready. We end up with these tiny baby carrots, but they taste delicious.

What I love about our time in the garden as a family is that everyone's hands are busy, so there are no screens, no phones. You're just together. And something about being in nature; everyone's nervous system just relaxes and calms down.

With our busy lives, I think we all crave that feeling of being next to the earth, even if we don't realize it at the time. When we come back inside, there's been a little reset.

What The Garden Teaches The Designer

The garden mirrors a lot about what I've learned in interior design. It's taught me that you're constantly evolving. I can stay true to my favorite things in my design aesthetic at my core, but that continues to evolve.

Every year I'm trying a new plant, and I learn things and file them away for later. And I do that with every single project that I undertake as a designer. The garden is that for me, too.

I had hesitation about starting a garden because I was nervous I would fail. And that was something that held me back when I was first starting to get into interior design as well. But I just started and learned. You get comfortable with the idea that it's okay for something not to work out. And there's pride that comes from what does work, and you get to enjoy it.

I'd say to anyone wanting to get their garden started: it doesn't have to be perfect. You don't need to research every single thing. Just go and you'll find out really quickly what your garden needs. It's such a work in progress.

When you plant something, it's going to look way different in a year's time. A garden evolves, just like a home evolves as people grow within it.

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Garden Diaries is our series where we share inspiring stories of designing and cultivating a stunning garden space. We explore how creatives, designers and tastemakers have grown a deeply personal space, inviting creativity, learning and happiness in their gardens, and how they live in these spaces.

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When Eric and Christopher Feml-Nelsen, better known online as Grow For Me Gardening, first arrived at their empty, new-construction plot in Upstate New York, they dreamed of creating a contemporary, English-inspired cottage garden. Novices at the time, they began transforming their suburban yard, not yet realizing how much the process would teach them.

In just eight years of experimenting and growing plants for the first time, the pair have curated an abundant garden that feels remarkably established. Hundreds of hydrangeas and roses spill across curving borders, while winding paths create secluded corners to pause in. For Eric and Christopher, it is far more than the backdrop to their home – it’s a private retreat, somewhere to reconnect with nature and nurture a growing obsession with plants.

The self-taught gardeners have documented every stage of building their garden from the ground up on social media, where they are now followed by thousands of aspiring gardeners. In sharing their successes, failures, and learnings, they inspire other beginners by showing you don’t have to be a professional to achieve a beautiful, richly planted garden. They say their biggest lesson has been to embrace the unpredictability of plants: ‘You have to let go of perfection and just enjoy the process.’

There Was Nothing Here

Our home was newly built in 2018, so there really wasn’t a garden – just an empty half-acre sandy plot with a handful of ornamental trees and shrubs.

The interior of our home was beautifully designed to our taste, but walking outside to nothing felt uninspiring. We were eager to get to work and transform it into a dreamy garden with romantic planting.

The only problem was that we weren't gardeners by profession or hobby, working in full-time jobs while trying to pull this garden together without really knowing what we were doing.

Our starting point was to take some photos, go to a garden center, and ask the staff what to do to make it better. We then dove headfirst into educating ourselves by researching online and in magazines. It didn't take long for us to become obsessed with TV shows like BBC’s Gardeners’ World.

Suddenly gardening felt like more than a hobby, it became a newfound passion that fuelled our creativity and opened our hearts to plants for the very first time.

We began by planting perennials we liked the look of, gradually carving out borders to soften the rectangular shape of the yard and give it more personality.

In the early stages, we took weekly trips to nurseries and garden centers. They always have plants that are looking their best in the moment, as well as what’s just about to bloom, so it gives you an idea what works seasonally.

But, this was only the beginning. We soon realized patience is fundamental when designing a garden from scratch.

It was then around 2020 that we decided to document this journey, using Instagram as a digital journal just for fun. What we didn't necessarily anticipate was how many other beginner gardeners would relate to us and wanted to hear the tips we had learned and even take inspiration from our garden. That's how Grow For Me Gardening was born.

Head Over Heels For Hydrangeas

We take a lot of our inspiration from English-style gardens, so it was inevitable that our first love would be hydrangeas.

We now have around 215 in total, a mix of varieties across the five main types grown in North America: oakleaf, smooth, panicle, bigleaf, and mountain.

The panicles were actually some of the first plants we introduced. Our yard lacked privacy, so we used 15 shrubs to create a hydrangea hedge for screening.

As soon as we saw those cone-shaped flowers, we knew we needed more varieties to fill our borders.

Now, hydrangeas are planted across the garden in groups of three and five for impact, creating layers of texture, color, and different flower silhouettes.

We’ve always loved blue hydrangeas, but they're so difficult to grow here. Our soil is fairly neutral, while they prefer acidic conditions, but we of course covet what we can't have.

However, we do grow a lot of Proven Winners hydrangeas (which are available at Nature Hills) because they have some incredible varieties for remontant flowering.

The ability for bigleaf hydrangeas to flower on new wood has been game-changing in particular. Our cold winters cause buds to freeze, but these reblooming varieties allow for a display later in the season.

It's been a joy to discover plants like this because it's made it possible for us to grow showy shrubs that would otherwise struggle in our climate.

Now we're constantly looking for more. It's like a challenge to add the most unique hydrangeas to our collection and prove that we can grow them.

Finding Seasonal Rhythm

Our growing season is really from May to October and we’ve learned to make the most of those months.

We focused on creating continual interest, so our space looks a little bit different every week. You can’t just plant things that look good in spring or you’ll end up with nothing through summer.

With that being said, the biggest spring highlight is our giant snowball viburnum at the back of the garden. We’ve pruned it into a multi-stem tree that fills out with perfectly round blooms.

And right now, many summer bulbs are waking up, with lots of alliums beginning to emerge.

But as the garden has matured, the real jewel of summer has become our collection of David Austin roses. We’ve just planted ‘Dannahue’, which was only released in the US last year, so it will be exciting to see the blooms in person and bury our noses in the fragrance.

The apricot ‘Lady of Shalott’ and the blousy pink ‘The Ancient Mariner’ have also both done very well for us, bringing a softness to the planting.

We really love adding unique plants to the garden that spark conversation. The one plant our community of followers always ask about is ‘Kintzley’s Ghost’, a North American native honeysuckle.

You wouldn’t immediately recognise it as a honeysuckle. It has silver rounded bracts that look almost like eucalyptus on a vine. It has small yellow flowers that turn into red berries in fall, which the birds love.

We planted it as a small quart-sized plant and within a few years it filled an entire section of the fence. It's been such a reliable addition and taught us to just try new things and see what works.

The importance of evergreens in the yard becomes much clearer every time winter arrives. Our growing season is short, but these structural plants provide interest all year.

One of the most striking is ‘Troemner’ blue spruce which brightens the winter garden landscape. We’re also adding more golden evergreens this season, mixing different heights and textures so there’s depth even when all the summer blooms have faded.

These evergreens don’t just carry the garden through winter, they also provide some grounding in the busier months. It's somewhere for the eye to rest among the overwhelming color and movement of spring and summer planting.

Adapting As We Grow

We’re not perfect gardeners and have certainly faced some challenges along the way.

One of the struggles we’ve had with smooth hydrangeas is slugs nibbling at the base of the stems, which then weakens them and causes the stems to fall over.

We’ve also dealt with leaftier caterpillars, which take two hydrangea leaves and wrap them around the flower bud to create a pouch. They sit inside and eat the flower bud and foliage, but we've found the natural pest control method is peeling open those leaves and flicking them away.

Both of us actually still work in full-time employment alongside social media, so there are also some techniques we use to make the garden easier to manage.

Drip irrigation provides supplemental water on a timer, while we layer plants densely and let self-seeding flowers do a lot of the work to suppress weeds. The purple top verbena is one of our favorites – it happily seeds itself around the garden and fills in gaps naturally with bright pops of color.

As for feeding the garden, we source compost locally and use it for mulching.

All of these things not only help the garden look better and healthier, but also take away some of the more laborious tasks, which means we can actually enjoy living in the space and not just spend every spare hour in our busy schedules tending to it.

The Garden Takes the Lead

Over the last eight years here, we've achieved so much, but we're far from done. The garden is never truly finished, and truthfully, we like to push and challenge ourselves to do even more.

In many ways, we’ve learned to relinquish control. You can't always predict what nature will do and there’s something quite freeing in accepting that. In fact, it's joyful to see how the garden changes each year, even when it doesn't quite go to plan.

When we first started gardening, the smallest things being out of place would feel stressful. If rose petals had fallen, we’d be straight out there clearing them up.

Now, we’re far more relaxed.

We let the garden do its thing, just guiding it where needed, and not holding onto perfection. We embrace the hurdles and changes, and allow the garden to shape us into better gardeners.

You can follow along Eric and Christopher's gardening journey on Instagram and YouTube @growformegardening, where they share regular updates.

Garden Diaries is our series where we share inspiring stories of designing and cultivating a stunning garden space. We explore how creatives, designers and tastemakers have grown a deeply personal space, inviting creativity, learning and happiness in their gardens, and how they live in these spaces.

Love inspiring garden ideas, outdoor advice, and the latest news? Sign up for our newsletter and get the latest features delivered straight to your inbox.

When Summer Rayne Oakes, better known as Homestead Brooklyn to her followers, was given the chance to trade her small New York City apartment for a 90-acre plot in the breathtaking Finger Lakes, she couldn’t say no. The influencer and author spent nearly two decades nurturing an indoor jungle of over 1,000 houseplants. But, she finally felt ready to grow beyond her four walls – little did she realize just how much she needed a breath of fresh air.

Over the past five years, Summer Rayne and two friends have gently reawakened the land that is now known as Flock Finger Lakes. Formerly a plant nursery, they found it unusually barren upon arrival, not even a bird in sight. Now its sweeping meadows welcome wildlife to reclaim the land, while Summer Rayne dabbles in designing the curated garden spaces of the homestead.

After years of feeling that apartment gardening had set the limits of her relationship with plants, Summer Rayne stepped into her new garden and discovered what happens when one is given the room to grow. 'Being here,' she says, 'I have more freedom to experiment and I can really give back to nature. I feel like I come alive here.'

It Was Time For a Change

I bought this place with my two friends, Sander and Joey. That might seem like an unusual arrangement to some, but it's the best decision I've made.

Really, I don't think I would have done it otherwise. I almost lost the dream of owning land while I was in the city because it's the type of place that reels you in and it can be hard to leave.

In a way, I think my houseplants reminded me to get outdoors because they brought me so much joy. I just wanted a garden that feels like stepping into a Monet painting.

That's why I knew pretty quickly that Finger Lakes is where I wanted to be. It's a beautiful geological region of New York with 11 lakes, stunning waterfalls, and various different types of land, from mountainous to agricultural.

We came to view the property and put an offer in the same day. Five years later, we've made it our own and it continues to grow. We live here, we work here, it's the place we can call ours.

I grew up surrounded by farmland in Northeastern Pennsylvania and I've always loved being out in nature. I actually have an education in environmental science, so working on regenerative projects like this has always been a dream of mine.

This land was previously a plant nursery. Sadly a lot of the horticultural infrastructures, like the greenhouses, were sold by the time we got here. But, we did inherit lots of wells, buildings, and barns which we're renovating.

The owner of the nursery unfortunately fell ill, so the land was essentially left alone for a couple of years. Nature truly took over in that time while the property awaited a new caretaker. Then we arrived.

Flock Finger Lakes is 90 acres, though we currently only manage about 25 which is split into different spaces: a native insect meadow, the orchard, a bulb lawn, a half lake, and various gardens.

There's no doubt the development has been far more expansive than just growing plants indoors, which I did for the best part of 20 years in Brooklyn. Yet, I'm still worried I'm going to somehow run out of space because there's so much I want to do here.

Part of me wishes that we got a piece of land with mature planting, so we could enjoy the fruits of the previous owner's labor.

Instead, we've been forced to start everything from scratch. I've come to accept it takes time for things to fruit and it takes time for a tree to have some growth, so I'm just enjoying the journey.

I'm constantly amazed at how much the garden puts on each year.

Nurturing the Land Back to Life

Being an ecologist by training, I'm really a systems thinker.

Seeing plants rise to the occasion, as far as being a food source or cover for wildlife, rehabilitating the land, and changing the landscape has been the most rewarding experience.

The land was managed as a container nursery, so it was devoid of a lot of native plants and had a lot of accumulated rubbish in the form of old tiles, metal, and geotextiles. From just nine acres we removed nearly 96 tonnes of trash and thousands of invasive honeysuckle and multiflora rose.

This space is now home to a native insect meadow, one of my favorite parts of the garden.

There are over 80 different types of native (and some non-native) plants here that provide vital food sources for pollinators and beneficial insects. In turn, this helps feed birds like bobolinks and orioles.

I really value interactions with wildlife, which is obviously not something you get indoors. Before even prioritizing growing our own food in our garden, I wanted to make sure there was food for the birds and insects so they would return.

That's definitely my main reason for doing this.

Some of the ornamental grasses in the meadow include panicgrass, blue grama, and purpletop grass.

As for blooms, we have echinacea, Liatris, Joe-Pye weeds, and daisies, among others.

It's all about managing your expectations and accepting that sometimes plants don't end up where you plan for them to go.

Take lupines, for example. An expert told me they wouldn't perform well here but now they're everywhere, probably because there's a lot of stone in the soil creating drainage.

After all, a lot of wildflowers thrive in poor soil quality.

It's amazing to see. The plants never fail to surprise me, they just grow where they want to grow.

Creating New Spaces

While I view the meadow as a wildscape full of (mainly) native plants, I like to do some experimentation elsewhere in the garden. I just love getting out there and creating spaces that didn't exist before.

The shade garden is one of my favorites because it was the first real garden that I put in. In a way, it's an homage to the man who owned the nursery.

It's a tiny garden where he planted a Norway spruce, a Japanese maple called 'Tamukeyama', and a weeping white pine.

I decided to extend the path because the trees started to take over. Then, I planted this very diverse, rich underlayer of spring ephemerals.

Foam flowers, trillium, twinleaf, native and non-native geraniums all create the most beautiful ground cover. There are probably 70 or 80 different types of plants underneath that little area.

It taught me so much about what can actually grow in shade, and I personally think it looks good all year round – though May and June are definitely when it looks best.

I'm pretty proud of how we transformed the lawn space. We planted 80,000 bulbs in the fall of 2021 and 2022, and now that it's been a few years, the bulbs have naturalized and spread so it's fairly low-maintenance.

This is one of the most important spaces for early nectar sources for pollinators, with the earliest blooms including snowdrops, winter aconite, muscari, fritillaries, and crocus.

As long as we're not buried beneath snow (which sometimes goes on until May here), these flowers create a colorful living carpet as soon as February.

It's definitely about striking a balance between working with nature and curating the garden to my taste.

I love that I don't have to do much around the ponds, for example. Our one pond is very naturalistic and we let the edges go a little hairy, so to speak.

Before, this area was mowed and maintained routinely. Now we're almost 'unmowing' it and letting nature do its thing.

It's just a different management technique, but resulted in a super abundant area. I recently planted some plugs of native swamp mallow and they took off straight away.

I'm Not Scared to Fail

One of the biggest lessons I've learned here has come from Tulipa sylvestris, or woodland tulip.

It ended up being one of my favorite bulbs we planted with vibrant yellow flowers, but after a couple of years it became super rhizomatous. This essentially means it's still there but only sends up foliage and doesn't always flower.

It taught me not to rush on decisions. If I took the time to do more research, I could have chosen something more reliable for color every year.

I like to do these mini experiments, though. I'm not afraid to learn from them.

I get to play with things in the garden and see how they turn out. I just kind of put a plant where I think it should go and start a garden from there.

Well, to a certain extent. I do have to consult my partners when it comes to bigger trees and shrubs. I once planted an American chestnut right in the middle of a path because it had perfect light – they weren't too happy about it.

This carefree approach is quite liberating, even when it fails.

The Future of the Flock

I don't think our homestead will ever be 'done.' There are so many things I still want to do.

Right now we're working on the six garden spaces by the Meadow House. They're all different shapes and need time to fill out, so I'm plugging in lots of plants.

We have a deer fence to stop it all being wiped out, which has also given us vertical garden space.

I plan to have clematis and roses, alongside the hops and an amazing 'Kintzley's Ghost' native honeysuckle that's already climbing. I even have raspberries that I'm training up the fence.

I love the coreopsis, native anemones, and achillea growing here, and I'm also planning to add some dahlias and more of the big showy blooms.

I'm working on a hummingbird garden, too, with lots of red and purple flowers, including gladiolus.

Really, because this part of the homestead is facing the road, I see it as being more than just our garden – hopefully it's something beautiful for others to look at as they pass by.

Another long-term plan is for Flock Finger Lakes to host both creative and garden residencies. It's the idea that people can come and spend some time in nature to do their work, or work with us, on a specific project.

We've created a regenerative space here and it's energizing to be in. I would love to share that with others.

I actually still have my apartment in Brooklyn, but it's kind of an afterthought.

That's mainly because I love being at the homestead. I also have ducks and chickens, so I can't leave them. But I really do feel most at home here because every day is different.

I love getting up in the morning and seeing how the shade garden has changed, how another inch has grown. It all just happens so quickly. If I leave even for a couple of days, I miss something bursting into life.

This place has quite literally expanded my horizons. I've gone from being restricted to indoor growing to now working on a continually evolving homestead Sander, Joey, and I can call our own.

And there's still so much more to look forward to.

In a way I've returned to my environmental science roots, but it's a less rigorous, more organic kind of study. I'm just living on the land, observing, and seeing what there is to discover next.

Flock Finger Lakes document the development of their homestead on YouTube. You can also keep up to date with Summer Rayne @homesteadbrooklyn on Instagram.

Garden Diaries is our series where we share inspiring stories of designing and cultivating a stunning garden space. We explore how creatives, designers and tastemakers have grown a deeply personal space, inviting creativity, learning and happiness in their gardens, and how they live in these spaces.

Love inspiring garden ideas, outdoor advice, and the latest news? Sign up for our newsletter and get the latest features delivered straight to your inbox.

Two years ago, Lucy Hunter took a leap of faith. Fuelled by a lifelong career in landscape design and floral art, she followed a creative calling and poured her love of botanicals into hand-painted luxury wallpaper. With it, she inspires homemakers to fill their living space with the whimsy, romance, and nostalgia of the natural world.

Courageously, Lucy made this career change just as she entered her 50s, coinciding with a new marriage that took her overseas. As she prepared to trade her acre-long garden in the wet and cold North Wales of the UK for a sun-soaked container garden on the Kiawah Island of Charleston, South Carolina, Lucy couldn't have imagined how downsizing would calm the anxiety of braving to start again.

Her garden is just one year old but has already changed the trajectory of her relationship with plants and quickly become the quiet muse of her craft. Now, Lucy says, as she takes a deep inhale and potters around her containers, 'for the first time ever, I feel like I'm in the right place.'

Downsizing and Letting Go

I got married to my wife last year and we've been creating this garden together ever since.

After trying and failing to plant in the wider yard, we realized there was no other choice but to restrict gardening to our small deck.

We lost a beautiful acer tree to deer (who will eat anything that looks vaguely green and delicious), so the deck really just safeguards our precious plants and effort, while letting wildlife roam the yard as they please.

It's quite different to my North Wales garden, which was an acre in size and lovingly curated from scratch over 12 years. It was hard upkeep and there would be multiple spots I couldn't always get around to – I would just tell my guests to avert their eyes.

Rather than tirelessly firefighting to keep plants alive, I can now tune into my peaceful and manageable container garden. It teaches me to just potter, take my time with the plants, and really notice them. Slowing down like this has been huge in connecting with nature and finding new details to add into my design work.

I've had to be considered with what to plant because space is an absolute premium. The plants really have to earn their keep, especially in the extreme summers here.

I would say it has the essence of an English garden. I think that style will always be rooted in me. After all, part of the reason Charleston felt like home so quickly was because of the European influences in the architecture.

The spring brings perfect weather, just beautifully warm with a gentle breeze, and not too humid. It's like the best of British weather, and I've been able to grow classic spring bulbs, including daffodils, tulips, hellebores, and fritillaries. Seeing these familiar, cheerful blooms is a comforting reminder of home.

Our covered porch is attached to the deck and, by contrast, feels hugely tropical. Everything considered an indoor plant in the UK lives here all spring and summer.

I love experimenting with different tropical plants. I've discovered shrimp plants, managed to grow abutilons, and have lots of ferns. They add so much texture to the space and are fun to design with.

For me, the vessels have been just as important in curating this space. My father was an antique dealer, so I've always loved containers with history.

I think the most ridiculous thing we shipped was an incredible long copper pot from France. It's now full of ferns and was totally worth it, forming the centerpiece of the deck planting.

To complement it, I've chosen terracotta pots. I didn't want it to look like a random assortment of containers.

That's a nod to my floral work, in a way. I always try to keep things slightly monochrome because I find it more restful – but that's just a personal choice.

I've also repurposed some of the big 18th and 19th century urns from my floral art, which now find themselves housing plants on the deck.

Some of the pots are developing a beautiful patina, which gives the garden a feeling of having been there forever, even after just one year.

These pots tell stories of gardens past, as well as the new chapter currently unraveling.

This Place Challenges My Perception

Roses were a bit of a turning point for me in this garden.

I was open from the beginning to try growing different plants, but blousey roses have always been my favorite, so they were a non-negotiable.

Well, the likes of 'Honey Dijon' didn't last long with the intense summer heat and humidity.

Luckily for me, the Garden Club of Charleston is right on my doorstep, one of the oldest gardening groups in the US. I picked their brains, told them about my lost roses, and they told me there's just one thing to try: Knock-Out roses. So, I went out and bought one.

They're designed for the climate here, with incredible heat, drought, and humidity tolerance. To my delight, they bloomed all summer long. I even picked some stems, dried them, and now they're decorating my home.

It's one of the plants that taught me to discard pre-existing ideas and be curious about everything that's around you. There's beauty to embrace wherever you are, so keep an open mind and you might just be pleasantly surprised.

It rings true even for the wider backyard landscape, where huge Southern live oaks are adorned with long tendrils of Spanish moss and accompanied by palm trees.

They have an architectural beauty that I just don't think you find in the same way anywhere else in the world, it's so characteristic of the Charleston islands. Even though there aren't lots of flowers growing naturally here, I've come to appreciate the value of these structural silhouettes.

When October arrives, it feels like a breath of fresh air. The milder temperatures help my garden gain some life again, especially the heirloom chrysanthemums and salvias.

The most fabulous thing to accompany the fall garden is the migrating hummingbirds who stop by as they travel south. We get some incredible wildlife, it honestly feels like living on a safari park – I sometimes half-expect to walk out there to find a giraffe, and we actually do have a resident alligator in the pond that backs onto the yard.

The winter does get a bit wet, but we only really have a couple of weeks of frosty weather. The tropical plants in the porch come into our dining room, which sit perfectly against the mural I painted on the wall.

Just for that moment, it brings the lightness and calmness of the outdoors into our home. It's the exact feeling I want to capture in my wallpaper and fabric designs.

Really, having to work with this new climate has been a good thing for me. It's forced me not to be too safe, not just plant specific varieties because I know them, but rather consider what will actually grow here and what will work for the environment.

I find it exciting. I'm approaching my mid-50s and I'm having to rethink everything I thought I knew after 25 years of landscape designing in the British climate. There's still so much to learn and I'm really relishing the challenge.

My Containers Are My Muse

My curiosity in the garden finds its way onto my wallpaper.

I'm heavily inspired by my father's antiques background, so I've always been interested in old textiles and French influences. I then bring in the whimsy of the florals that I have worked with in my art and grown in the garden.

I like my florals to be wild. They don't take themselves too seriously but they have this kind of architectural foundation.

The colors have always been muted and soft because I was living in rainy Wales. Now I'm in sunny Charleston and the weather is beautiful, I feel as though my design is shifting.

I don't necessarily mean I'm going to start drawing lots of palm trees, but I'm very interested in the textures I find here.

When I started floral design in 2018, it changed how I thought about garden design. I would look at an otherwise boring shrub and zoom in on the leaf texture.

Elaeagnus 'Quicksilver' is a good example. It has really thin foliage, but it makes such a good foil, a good neutral among other colors that have more of a pop.

I'm definitely exploring this in my containers. I like there to be quite strong lines in the planting, complementing focal flowers.

I think of it as a bit of an orchestra pit, with the violins and oboes in the form of tulips and gorgeous 'Tiger Eye' violas nestled at the bottom. I then have plinths for vertical space. It's all about creating interest in each part of the journey upward, causing your eye to pause and stop rather than just pass by.

I always look for these layers in my design, and in respect to the garden, it's that sort of thing that really transforms it into a different space.

A lot of clients I've worked with feel like they don't know where to start with their big garden and it's because it doesn't have a roof like a room does. But, building on layers and bringing in textures can really turn it into a sanctuary that feels secure and personal – that's the emotion I want to bring into the home when I'm painting.

There's Still More to Be Done

The garden is entering its second year now and there's so much to be said for the strength its gained after I failed and tried again with growing the right plants, figuring out how to work in a smaller space, and choosing to slow down and appreciate every season.

In this new part of my life, that's so important. The last couple of years have been quite stressful – glorious – but stressful.

Gardens are good for the soul wherever you are, but for me this little garden has been a bit of a lifesaver in such a noisy world. Knowing it was waiting for me offered stability as I moved away from life in the UK.

But of course, it continues to evolve and there is even more to be done this year.

Extending the deck is a must, but we are limited with how much we can do because we're in a conservation area. That's probably a good thing, though, because I would just keep extending it forever and this forces me to stay focused.

One of the bigger projects is the lawn in the yard. It doesn't do much at the moment, so my plan is to swap it for some perennial ornamental grasses that reflect the natural marsh landscape of the island. Though, we need to think carefully about the heat and deer-resistant varieties.

That's probably the most important lesson I want to pass on: the first stage in creating a garden from scratch is observing your yard, how much light comes in, and the surrounding landscape. Trust me, it will save a lot of heartache over failed plants you spent money on at the garden center.

Have the Courage to Make a Change

Finally, I feel like I'm in the right place, personally and physically. I like to think that presents itself in my designs and a sense of contentment and joy comes through.

This move to the US, the challenge of starting a new garden in an unfamiliar climate, and choosing to be more curious about plants have given me an energizing muse that sparks creativity like never before.

If you have a feeling to change something in your life, have the courage to do it. You never know where it might take you.

You can follow Lucy's journey @lucytheflowerhunter on Instagram and explore her designs on her website. The Flower Hunter books are also available on Amazon and are full of Lucy's tips and tricks for expert floral arranging.

Garden Diaries is our series where we share inspiring stories of designing and cultivating a stunning garden space. We explore how creatives, designers and tastemakers have grown a deeply personal space, inviting creativity, learning and happiness in their gardens, and how they live in these spaces.

Love inspiring garden ideas, outdoor advice, and the latest news? Sign up for our newsletter and get the latest features delivered straight to your inbox.

When Sasha York first stood in what would become her walled garden at Hutton Wandesley Stables, there was almost nothing there. Just an overgrown expanse that had been a pony paddock for 30 years, with weeds up to her waist and a single tree in the middle. The three Victorian brick walls still stood – weathered witnesses to generations of use and neglect – but the garden itself had disappeared.

For a couple of years, she simply mowed it. She needed to walk into the space every day, to understand its scale, to let it speak to her. She had an extraordinary advantage: the original 1874 plan drawn by her husband's great-great-great grandfather, showing exactly how he'd planned to build this productive space. A Peach house, heated walls, potting sheds; a proper Victorian kitchen garden designed to feed a grand household.

What Sasha has created over the past several years honors that history while bringing her own vision to life: a walled garden with four distinct zones, and running through it all, a sense of peace. This restoration is about more than design and planting. For Sasha, this garden – and the act of gardening – is a sanctuary.

Growing Up in Gardens

I grew up in Northumberland, in a family where the garden was everything. My parents had a beautiful garden, and we were always in it.

When you were home for a weekend or on holidays, half the time you'd be in the garden; weeding, edging, helping Mum, always doing something.

They had a really beautiful vegetable garden, and my biggest memory is shelling peas on a Sunday afternoon. That's such a special memory for me. And the smell of broad beans – that velvety touch when you open the pod, then the smell when you're blanching them to put in the freezer or having them with your sausages in the evening.

From the City to Yorkshire, and Starting from Scratch

I moved to London to begin my career and I became a bond trader. The City in those days was a really full-on place. It was very aggressive, and male-dominated. You had to really stand up for yourself as a woman. And I became very thick-skinned.

But gardens and flowers and fresh air were a total tonic. The complete opposite of that environment. So I gardened constantly. It was my sanctuary.

Once we had children, we came to Yorkshire. The house we moved to had no garden at all, so I created it from scratch. I designed it, I planted it, and I add something every two or three years. It's really beautiful and amazing.

I realized this was what I really loved. And it gave me confidence, so when people began asking, 'Will you come and design my garden,' I could say, 'Yes!'

Designing a garden idea doesn't happen sitting at a desk. It's much more about being in it and saying, 'Right, you need something there. Where do you look out from your window? How often do you spend time here? What times are you in the garden?'

Because it's not just about how to create a beautiful-looking garden; it's how you use it.

The Walled Garden – Honoring History, Creating Sanctuary

When I first got the go-ahead to start on the walled garden here at Hutton Wandesley Stables, I just mowed. And I continued to mow it for two years just so I could get the scale of it. I needed to walk into it every day and feel the space.

I have the original plan from 1874. It shows how my husband's great-great-great grandfather wanted it to be, complete with a peach house, a potting shed, a melon house, and a cucumber house. The walls were heated at one time, and the boiler houses are still there. That's how they could grow such amazing fruit. A peach house in Yorkshire – the thought is incredible.

I wanted to honor him and that plan, but when we were doing the work, I didn't really find much evidence of exactly what had been planted. So whether he drew it and didn't necessarily complete it all, I'm not entirely sure.

So with those plans in mind I began to craft my own interpretation, and decided on the best plants for this walled garden.

I divided it into a traditional English long border and four distinct quadrants: a floral cutting garden bursting with romance, color and fragrance; a manicured lawn; a perennial meadow garden with beds planted around a central water feature; and an Italian-influenced garden with 16 parterres, bursting with swathes of Verbena bonariensis in summer.

I knew I wanted a July into November garden, which had to include grasses, and this became my perennial garden.

Now, grasses came late to me. If you'd asked me ten years ago, I would not have put grasses in a garden. But now I love them. I would put them in any garden because they give you so much in winter and also in spring and summer when they're growing up.

Then I needed to find drought-tolerant plants, because even through we are in Yorkshire this is a dry pocket. I needed plants that would really survive anything. It had to look wonderful, but not be too high-maintenance.

I knew straight away I wanted an Acer in the middle, with beautiful jagged leaves, absolutely stunning. Then I created the soft underplanting with lots of astrantia. (You can find astrantia seeds to start yourself at Amazon). I added Perovskia (Russian sage) for the height that would come up afterwards, then I added deep orange grasses for contrast.

I've got Stipa tenuissima planted outside to give that lovely soft flow against the structure of the box edging. And beautiful, frothy Filipendula (meadowsweet) around the acer.

Some of my most favorite plants in this garden are the hebes and lavender for evergreen interest, euphorbia for height and structure in the outside beds, and Cimicifuga (Actaea) to keep upright and overlook; they're my soldiers.

To me, Actaea simplex has to be in everyone's garden. The deep crimson color is unbelievable, and the fragrance in the evening is extraordinary. It's one of the most wonderful night-scented plants. (Starter plants of Actaea simplex are available from Amazon.)

Finding Peace Through Difficulty

Life brings challenges we can't always control or fix. Gardening has been the one place where I can go and just touch the soil, dig, plant, take a cutting and process whatever needs processing.

For me personally, it just makes me able to go back out and do whatever I have to do. It's a mindful practice.

I think there's something about a walled garden design that is quite magical. I think some of it is because it a safe place. You're enclosed. Once you're in a walled garden, it's a bit like when you close your front door to your home – you feel safe and at peace.

You've only got what's in there. You don't need to worry what's on the other side of the wall. It's very special, very peaceful. I love to think about how many people have worked that soil? How many people have been in there, tending and caring for this land?

I think they just offer such a place of peace and solitude. It's like a big hug around the outside. A sanctuary.

Now I try to share that feeling in all the workshops I offer here, from willow weaving and botanical painting to cutting garden masterclasses. I'm also launching a plant fair here in May, to spotlight some of the best plants for walled gardens.

The Magic of Walled Gardens

The walls give you so much. They give you heat in the summer, and trap it beautifully. But equally in winter, they can trap the cold in. That's why they would have been heated.

A walled garden traditionally would have had a slatted gate to let the air and frost out. They'd have little holes in the bricks to let the frost out, otherwise it becomes a real frost pocket.

I would say to anyone: don't be afraid of gardening. It doesn't matter if it goes wrong. It doesn't matter if something's in the wrong place. You learn all the time.

Sometimes I don't listen to anything when I'm gardening. I literally just listen to the birds. I'm probably having a few conversations in my head, but I'm simply there.

And I think that's what this walled garden has taught me most: that no matter what life brings, there's always the garden. There's always soil to touch, plants to tend, seasons to honor. There's always that sanctuary waiting, enclosed and safe, ready to help you reset and face whatever comes next.

You can follow Sasha @sashinthegarden on Instagram.

Garden Diaries is our series where we share inspiring stories of designing and cultivating a stunning garden space. We explore how creatives, designers and tastemakers have grown a deeply personal space, inviting creativity, learning and happiness in their gardens, and how they live in these spaces.

Love inspiring garden ideas, outdoor advice, and the latest news? Sign up for our newsletter and get the latest features delivered straight to your inbox

There was one moment a little over a decade ago, when everything changed for Hilton Carter. Back then, he wasn't the houseplant guru and interior stylist we know and love today, giving us indoor plant expertise in his trademark punchy formats and scroll-stopping plant rants.

He was an exhausted filmmaker, working freelance in LA directing commercials, hustling and trying to forge a path in a gruelling industry. The effort of being creative in an energy-zapping space was taking its toll. Then he walked into a greenhouse café in Pennsylvania, where he was shooting a campaign, and something shifted. All his stress disappeared. The energy, the light, the greenery – it put him in the moment, and the clouds began dissipate.

Suddenly, Hilton could hear and see the people in front of him. Before he left, he thought 'whatever's in this space, I need to bottle it up and take it with me'. The seed was planted at that very moment. What has grown from it, however, Hilton could never have predicted.

Finding The (Literal) Light

I left Los Angeles in 2014 and moved to New Orleans, to a space in the French Quarter that had really big windows. I had already understood in that moment in Pennsylvania that this transformation was about the light.

As someone in filmmaking, I understood that light is important. And it's just as crucial in plant care.

It was time to bring some plants in. I bought a fiddle leaf fig, thinking this would start that process I felt in Pennsylvania. I was trying to recreate that feeling in my home.

Slowly, I realized it wasn't just the act of bringing in plants that would create that moment for me. When that fiddle leaf fig started to die, I realised I needed to do more and learn how to care for these plants. Just like I made that promise to myself in Pennsylvania, there in New Orleans, I took on the challenge.

I said I would dedicate my time, my effort, to making sure I nurtured this plant. I even gave it a name: Frank. And that challenge, I believe, is the thing that changed who I was mentally and spiritually.

I started seeing these small nuances, these small changes and shifts in the foliage. A color that wasn't prevalent before was now right there in my face. I was taking note of these things, working through the process.

The Secret Lesson I Learnt from Plants

Before I found plants, my career was number one on my list. I could only focus on myself, and this took a toll on my relationships with others.

I started tending to plants, not thinking that this process was linked to people. But it was the secret lesson plants were teaching me. Through that process of nurturing plants, I think I, without knowing, became a steward in understanding how to tend to the other living things in my life.

That was the aha moment. It is the patience and the understanding and the note-taking and the listening that I was doing with plants. And that note-taking in that space helped me be better for the other individuals in my life.

It slowly changed me into being more considerate and patient with myself and my career. Patient with how relationships develop. That slow unfurling of a leaf isn't going to happen at the speed you might want it to. Any difference in temperature, in light, in hydration, and watering of plants can change the way a new, developing, fragile, unfurling leaf develops.

The idea of talking about how the care of plants is parallel to how you tend and nurture other individuals was always so woo-woo to me in the past. But it was proven to me that there can be a real difference in who you are if you can look at it that way.

Memory and Meaning – Plants as Time Machines

When I work on styling spaces, whether mine or other people's, I think about how a particular thing is going to spark a feeling. Whether that's joy, happiness, or some wonderful memory. For me, when I started to bring more plants in, I thought about the moments in my life where I was the happiest. And what that environment would look like.

Ultimately, for me, it was when I was surrounded by a bunch of plants, on some sort of vacation. Whether that was in a beautiful conservatory here in Baltimore, maybe one in Chicago, maybe the Huntington in Pasadena, California. Those moments always felt like they were surrounded by greenery.

So I tend to think about that in my own space. How does a particular plant, wherever it's going to be placed, reflect a memory of when I was the happiest or a wonderful moment in my life?

A lot of the plants here are plants from moments of being with my wife. Tulum is where we got married, and some of the tropical plants here were purchased to reflect or remind me of those moments.

I remember that monstera there, that palm there, seeing the dappled light dance around the walls, the floor there in the jungle. Trying to recreate those moments in my home has been one of my main goals in styling my own space.

It's one of the reasons we purchased this home and why we poked so many holes in the walls to create more windows and light.

When I was in that jungle space in Tulum, when you looked out any window or in any direction, there was just so much greenery and goodness. Here, we needed to replicate that in some sense.

Another of my favorite plants is a Monstera 'albo' that was gifted to me right before my daughter was born. At that point in time, it was mid-2021, and this plant was rare.

They were selling for $2,000 for such a small plant. A cutting of one leaf was going for hundreds of dollars. People were losing their minds over it. I was tending to this plant like it already was my child. It had its own humidifier. I would go over daily and say all these really sweet things to it, even give it affirmations.

Daily Plant Rituals

My go-to morning plant care ritual (after coffee) is misting. While it isn't going to provide a lot of humidity for your plants, it provides a lot to me. I'll mist my more humidity-loving plants that absorb moisture throughout the week, and I get a real sense of joy out of wiping down the foliage. Every day, I'll take a moment to wipe down a particular plant.

If you stay on it and wipe a plant down, it's going to help you see whether you have any pests. But I also think it's that moment where you're spending time tending to something; grooming it in some sense.

I spend that time with the plant. They say you shouldn't have a favorite child, but some plants get a little bit more talking to, especially if you've gone through it with them.

Frank, my fiddle leaf fig, he's in my office now. When I'm in my office working, he and I have a heart-to-heart about how far we've come and how different we are in our age. The changes that have happened have made us who we are.

I tell people: you buy a plant when you see it at a plant shop based on that moment you saw it. You're like, 'I love this plant'. But be mindful that the plant looks the way it does for that moment in that space.

Who knows how long it had been in that space before it came from that grower, in some beautiful, humid greenhouse. Now you're going to take it and put it in your home.

So let it become its true self for you. Let it drop those leaves, turn and bend that way, do those weird things where it gets a little brown on the tip here and there. Now it's yours. Now it's its true self.

The shift and the change will happen, and that doesn't make that plant any less appealing or less beautiful. It still is beautiful for what it is in your space. When I'm moving through watering or wiping down plants or rotating them, I always give that plant some love.

I say, man, I've done what I'm supposed to do here, but you've also been resilient enough to keep going and growing and being part of the space, part of the home, part of my life, part of my family's life. It's giving it that gratitude.

The Nurture that Nurtures You

The nurturer nurtures you. That's another thing I always say. I think that's the give and take. As much as I provide them, they provide me. It's a beautiful balance every single morning and night. That's a good way to live your life in some sense.

I don't know if I would be where I am now, who I am now, if I hadn't gone to that plant nursery in Pennsylvania. Maybe I needed that moment at that time.

I'm just very thankful that it was the thing that led me here because there is no better place for me to be than the spot I'm in right now.

One thing you learn when you surround yourself with so many living things is that life is fragile. You need to give yourself a little grace, especially when you're trying to tend to so many things at once. You're not going to be fully successful one hundred percent of the time.

I allow the plants to become who they are while still making sure I give them what they need. If something's not working, I don't let it suffer and die. I troubleshoot. Oh, you need more humidity? Let me bring a humidifier into this part of the home. Let me change this out. Let me keep trying.

It's been my cheap version of therapy. And really it all started with light. Light coming through greenhouse windows in Pennsylvania. Light that made me see – really see – for the first time in a long time.

Hilton's book, Living Wild, available from Amazon, has so many more tips and advice on how to grow and style an indoor jungle.

Garden Diaries is our series where we share inspiring stories of designing and cultivating a stunning garden space. We explore how creatives, designers and tastemakers have grown a deeply personal space, inviting creativity, learning and happiness in their gardens, and how they live in these spaces.

When Kendall Smith-Franchini and her husband Laurent first saw their home, the Woodland House, 15 years ago, the real estate agent showed them the outside first – the yard, the orchard, the potential. As newlyweds looking for a place with some ground to work with, they were completely thrilled. It took a decade, however, for their garden dreams to come to life.

They had established The Cook's Atelier, the family's cooking school and culinary boutique in the heart of Beaune, France, a few years before buying their 1850s home, and were focused on building a lifestyle business with a farm-to-table ethos at its heart. From the very beginning, Kendell, her mother Marjorie, and Laurent worked closely with food producers in the Burgundy region to source the best local ingredients they could find.

Knowing they always wanted to get their own hands into the soil, five years ago the Atelier evolved again, and they finally created the kitchen garden they'd always dreamed of. The vision didn't stop there. The family also transformed a barn into an outdoor kitchen where guests can cook, and created a magical woodland dining area, building a retreat for students to discover and explore as part of their culinary learning. It's a long way from the Arizona desert where Kendall grew up, as she tells us here.

A French Idyll

I'm from Arizona, and so is my mom. And Arizona is by no means a place where you grow much of anything. It's a desert; not a lot of rain, not a lot of green.

We've always had this fascination for living in a place that had seasons, where you could actually grow food and flowers, and plant trees. That's always been the dream. And Burgundy in particular is really great because it's a blessed growing region with really good soil. We're surrounded by gardeners and farmers, not large industrial farms, but little tiny farms here and there everywhere. Some of them grow vegetables, some focus on fruit. It's a community of growers.

I was the Francophile in the family. My entire life, I said, 'I'm just moving to France.' I'd talk about it as a little kid, which my family teases me about all the time, because there aren't a lot of French-speaking people in Arizona, as you can imagine. But I was just determined. I studied art history, got interested in wine, and basically convinced everyone to move to Burgundy, including my husband, who's originally from the south of France.

My mom and I have been running The Cook's Atelier for 17 years now. As cooks, we've always been connected to the first roots of food. That's always been the backbone of what we do. It's been refreshing to be able to then live that – to grow what we cook, to show our guests where ingredients come from, to be part of this community of people who all have their little gardens or potagers.

Learning From the Community and The Land

The Woodland House sits in the countryside south of Beaune, along the route to the Grand Crus wine villages. It's a beautiful drive through vineyards and small towns.

The property itself is in a little valley with a creek running behind the house. We own part of the forest beyond, but a lot of it belongs to the tiny village. You can't construct anything on it, so the property feels much bigger than it really is. It's under two hectares, but it stretches into woodland.

We're really blessed with good soil. The climate is interesting. It's very rainy in Burgundy generally, especially in spring and fall, and it doesn't get really, really cold. We have a couple of snow days, but mostly we get frost, which can be tricky with the vineyards and fruit trees. A late frost can damage everything.

We actually don't need to water very often because it's so wet and moist here. In July and August, during the drought period, we're lucky because the little creek behind the house never goes dry. We can pump water from it if we need to, though very rarely do we need it even in summer.

We also have a lot of wildlife; blue herons, foxes, and deer. We're learning from the community too. Our neighbor taught us how to keep bees. We bring all the compost from the cooking school back to the garden. It's a very small team, and we wear many hats, but it's a passion we personally want to strive for, and it's nice to incorporate that into how our business functions, too.

We always had some sort of little variation of a garden over the years, but never anything grand. We work with really fabulous farmers and gardeners in Beaune who provide food for the cooking school, but we always wanted to give our hand at trying to grow ourselves too.

And five years ago, during the pandemic, we finally had the time. We have a green thumb, and we'd always wanted to plant our own garden. That was obviously the moment to do it.

We do the garden ourselves. And that's been fun because it's very much a learning curve. Every year, we're obviously learning. Every year is different.

We do a lot of companion planting, kind of basing it on permaculture principles. We grow mainly vegetables, but we also have a lot of fruit trees.

During the pandemic, we worked with an association that helps private homeowners preserve the heritage trees of the region, and we planted about 40 fruit trees. Among them are cherries, apples, pears, apricots, plums, persimmons, peaches, raspberries, and tons of currants.

The potager has a border of edible herbs that encircles the entire garden: chives, parsley, sage, rosemary, and lavender growing there. It's all edible, and it's year-round.

A Potager Garden with Family Soul

We have a thing for pumpkins, and we love the Cinderella pumpkins especially. We always try to do a mix of everything: lots of lettuces, lots of rocket, and Japanese greens. More variety than quantity, because every time we're serving guests, we want to have something different. So there are a lot of little tiny things going on.

It's definitely a mix of growing for taste and for beauty. We just recently got a little greenhouse, too.

We started so many little seedlings that first year, it was insane. They were all over the house, all over the place. Now we start some things from seed, and we're also really lucky because at the market and with farmers we visit, they also start little seed plants. It's a bounty. We share seeds with them sometimes, too.

The other thing that's really nice about our region is that even though it's very rural, there are a lot of international people. We have Greek people, Japanese people, and one of our favorite gardeners is a German guy who's constantly suggesting crops we should grow. We talk about seeds and techniques, and then we figure it out.

We're so busy during the week working that Sundays are our garden days. It's a family affair when we have garden days and everybody shows up, including my three children. Lucas is fourteen, Manon is twelve, and Lou is six. We try to make sure they're involved somehow. Their attention spans aren't huge, but we do try to make sure they're in the garden a little bit.

When we started five years ago, we made sure Luc had his little section. He's into native plants and trees, so he had his 'Three Sisters' bed – corn, beans, and pumpkins – which he is in charge of. Manon, the middle one, was always into cornichons. And Lou, the littlest, loved strawberries, so she had her little strawberry patch. We still continue that. We still try to have them make sure they're interested.

A garden day is basically a mix of everything; harvesting, weeding, and planting. We try to do it as often as we can, so it's not one big overwhelming task. And then usually what happens after we get through that part is we end with a big, nice family lunch. We sit outside at the barn, and it's a lovely reward.

Learning as we Grow – Mistakes and Revelations

We've had our fair share of learning experiences. Our very first year, like every new gardener, we planted way too many zucchini. We were so excited. But we didn't get one zucchini because we ate all the flowers before they could fruit.

We learn a lot from our guests too. Many of them are quite good gardeners. I remember one time a guest named Dee said to us, 'Ladies, you can't plant your eggplants away from each other. They all have to be together because that's how they pollinate.' I've learned a lot this way.

And every year we're learning something new. We've had our fair share of rogue squash growing up the compost pile because we forgot to add enough manure to the compost. That's a learning curve. But there are always little things like that. Every year you do get better the more you do it, and that's been fun.

I think in the beginning, when you first start, you're a little bit more rigid about things. But the more you do it, you just kind of ease into it and let the garden do its thing.

Sometimes the cosmos come back in a different area than I planted them the previous year, but they come back the next year and I just leave them because I like them. I just let it do what it wants in a way. It makes it easier for you, and it just looks more beautiful, I think, when you just let it take on its own life and personality.

It's nice to be able to show our guests the act of growing some of the food we cook. It doesn't have to be grandiose. We talk about that the entire week with them during our five-day masterclass programs.

After four days cooking in town at the Atelier, the last day is a little bit more relaxing in the countryside, and more lifestyle-focused. We gather at the Woodland House, which is quite a treat for guests who come from all over the world. They get to be in the country, see the gardens, see the chickens, see the bees, all that stuff.

The barn kitchen, which we renovated just this past winter, is where we bring people to enjoy cooking and eating outdoors. It brings everything together. We often tell guests that it's meant to be a little bit of inspiration; it doesn't have to be a big, grandiose thing.

Getting Better, Season by Season

I think the goal is to get better at doing this and to be more of a seasoned gardener with more experience.

I'd also like to get better at creating more little nooks and niches in and around the wooded area. There are already a lot of little areas around the wooded part by the creek that have natural flowers, especially in spring, wild violets, primroses, things like that.

I think we could plant more bulbs, create little sections on the property that have a certain meaning or little experiences. Even in a small area, there's always room to change things, improve, and grow.

What's really lovely about the Woodland House is that it brings together everything we love about France. It's a place of gathering. And now, when people come from all over the world, we all gather here. It's very much this really idyllic French countryside location.

We're really proud of what we've created. We were brave in the sense that we just jumped headfirst into it. And I think once you grow something from seed and then enjoy the process of cooking it and eating it – even in a small form – it's really rewarding.

You can discover even more stories and techniques from The Cook's Atelier cooking school in their debut cook book, available from Amazon.

Garden Diaries is our series where we share inspiring stories of designing and cultivating a stunning garden space. We explore how creatives, designers and tastemakers have grown a deeply personal space, inviting creativity, learning and happiness in their gardens, and how they live in these spaces.

When interior designer Bunny Williams first found her house in north-western Connecticut, there was no garden. Just lawn stretching from the house; a monoculture punctuated by beautiful old trees standing like sentinels. But she saw something else entirely.

'I really bought the house because I wanted to create a garden,' she says. At the time, she knew little about gardens. Nothing about design principles, planting schemes or the architecture of outdoor rooms. 'I just knew that I loved getting my hands in the dirt, I loved flowers, and I loved vegetables.'

What began as that simple knowing would unfold over four decades into something extraordinary: a series of interconnected garden rooms that marry the precision of her interior designer's eye with the wild, uncontrollable beauty of the natural world. Connecting them all are crucial stretches of negative space, clipped hedges and green lawn, that allow you to breathe between one garden's complexity and the next. One has to remember that this is a 40-year endeavor. The garden ideas did not happen overnight, as Bunny recalls below.

The gardens of elsewhere – Learning from the masters

In those early years, I became a student of gardens. I travelled to France, Italy, England – anywhere I could to see great gardens in person, to walk through them and understand what made them work.

It was on these pilgrimages that something shifted in my understanding. One of the things I learned over the years is that a garden is not just about the flowers and the vegetables, it's very much about design.

The revelation came gradually, garden by garden, as I visited Sissinghurst with its famous white garden and intimate outdoor garden rooms, Hidcote with its perfectly proportioned spaces, and Russell Page's masterworks in Normandy.

That last visit proved transformative. Standing in one of Russell Page's French gardens, I saw how division could create intimacy.

I returned home and immediately staked out six beds in the grass of what would become my Sunken Garden, adding flagstone paving between them. Doing this created a much more intimate space. I had finally got the floorplan right.

And there it was: the vocabulary I knew so well from decades of interior design, now applied to the earth itself. Rooms. Floorplans. Furnishing. But with hedges instead of walls, and flowers instead of textiles.

The gardens evolved organically, each new space emerging in response to changes in the buildings themselves.

When we converted the barn into living space and added a conservatory, it immediately suggested the Parterre Garden behind it. So much of the gardens is their relationships to the buildings.

A lot of the development of the garden came over a period of time, and as we developed another part of a building, that allowed us to create another garden.

Those first beds I planted 40 years ago were filled with my favorites: peonies, foxgloves, roses, and lilies. I still grow them all today, though it took years of trial and error to understand how to mix color, texture, and height properly in a perennial border. The learning was slow, sometimes frustrating, but deeply satisfying.

And as each garden room took shape, I discovered something crucial that set my gardens apart from many I'd visited abroad. Garden rooms need connections. The one thing that is different about my gardens from many that I've gone to see is that I have negative space.

After the intricate, jewel-box complexity of the Sunken Garden, you walk through serene clipped hedges and green lawn to reach the Parterre. It's another complicated space, but approached through calm.

I find that gives me a place to relax in between. I tried to apply my designer's understanding of visual rest, pacing, and of knowing that a house filled only with pattern and color would overwhelm. The same principle applies outside.

Moving through the day, moving through the seasons

There is no better feeling than walking through my gardens. I don't have one favorite place; I'm always moving throughout. Each space holds its own discoveries depending on the time of day, the season, the quality of light.

On sweltering summer afternoons, I retreat to the Woodland Garden, always shaded, where I can watch dappled light moving through the trees. When you sit there and you take in nature, you have to be thankful.

Other times, I'm touring through each part of the garden in sequence: from the cool shadows of the woodland out into the bright sun of the Parterre, ending up at the birdhouse village.

And I spend considerable time in the vegetable garden, that most productive and demanding of spaces, where the work is constant and the rewards immediate.

My cutting garden supplies the house with a constant rotation of blooms: peonies, dahlias, and zinnias.

I'm particularly fond of 'queeny lime red' zinnias, you can find seeds on Amazon, as they have such vibrant color. I also love taller flowers like foxgloves, delphinium, lilies and sunflowers (find seeds on Amazon) that add great height to an arrangement. I love mixing in coleus leaves too, their burgundies and limes add unexpected foliage interest.

Memory and morning glories – The garden as time machine

The roots of all this go back much further than four decades, back to a Southern childhood and a mother who gardened.

When I was very little, I used to go out with my mother and a little trowel, and she would be picking tomatoes or staking this and that. I would help pick vegetables or peonies and bring them into the house. That made me love the idea of gardening and growing things.

There's one plant that bridges then and now, childhood and present, the hot South and cool Connecticut: morning glory. When I was growing up we had a large screened porch and my mother grew morning glories up on the screens for shade which I thought was beautiful.

In the South, porches were essential; places to escape the heat, to catch any breeze, to live during the long humid months. It was a place we spent a lot of time. I still grow morning glories in my garden. That simple act of planting them each year contains so much nostalgia.

What the garden teaches

Gardening is something that has taught me a lot about life. It's certainly taught me patience, which I don't have much of.

More profound still is the lesson of humility. For someone who has spent a career mastering interior spaces, controlling every element from paint color to pillow placement, the garden offers something radically different.

Whereas I can control the interiors of a house, I can't control what is happening outside. You have to give in to nature, the weather, the bugs, to whatever is going to be a part of your gardening experience. This surrender – learning to work with nature rather than imposing my will upon it – might be the garden's greatest gift.

You can read and see more of Bunny's garden in her delightful coffee table book, A Life in the Garden, available from Amazon.

Garden Diaries is our series where we share inspiring stories of designing and cultivating a stunning garden space. We explore how creatives, designers and tastemakers have grown a deeply personal space, inviting creativity, learning and happiness in their gardens, and how they live in these spaces.

In Homes & Gardens' Garden Diaries series, we delve into the stories, successes and challenges of tastemakers who view their gardens not merely as yards, but as sanctuaries.

Each gardener approaches the design, structure, even seasonal color choices with the same careful creativity as interior designers will indoors, transforming their outdoor spaces into vibrant extensions of their homes.

Beyond aesthetics and functionality, each garden featured in the series showcases how a cleverly designed garden can serve as a backdrop for relaxation, a space for entertaining, or a haven for wildlife, all while contributing to the overall beauty and harmony of the home.

When creatives Alan Calpe and Christopher Crawford first drove three hours north of New York City to view a cedar-shake bungalow in the Catskills, they weren’t gardeners. Originally from Florida, they had each spent two decades in New York working in visual arts, fashion and education. Their lives were full but confined: a small apartment, long hours and no outdoor space. 'We weren’t even window-box gardeners,' says Christopher. 'We came to gardening with absolutely no knowledge.'

What they found in Windham was four acres of woodland: a ski-town mountainside dense with ash trees, heavy clay soil and a rushing creek that split the property in two. There was a small guesthouse, a modest main house and a view across the slopes. 'It felt lucky,' says Alan. 'A chance to reconnect with nature, to slow down and to create something of our own.' And so, in 2016, they took on the challenge, with no plan beyond a desire to make something grow, and plenty of scope for garden ideas.

The reality, though, was more daunting. Soon after moving in, they cleared diseased ash trees to open up the view, only to be left with what Alan calls 'a Martian landscape' – bare clay and tree stumps. A vast void. Exciting and ripe with possibility, yes, but overwhelming too. It was here, then, at the edge of the forest – at the edge of everything – that their journey into gardening, and into listening to the land, began. In the years that followed, this love of nature would evolve into Gardenheir, their garden-inspired brand, rooted in the same mix of creativity, humility and wild beauty as the mountainside they now call home.

Beginnings in the Catskills – A move out of the city

When Christopher and I first left the city to look at a cedar-shake bungalow in the Catskills, we had no idea what we were getting ourselves into. We had each spent two decades in New York – me in the visual arts and arts education, Christopher in fashion – and our lives were full, but confined. We had no urban garden, no balcony, not even a window box. We came to this with absolutely no knowledge, only curiosity.

The house was modest, perched in Windham in US hardiness zone 5, a ski town set high in the mountains. What drew us was the land, though. The four acres of woodland, a rushing creek that cut between the small guest house and the main bungalow, and a view that opened up, where the mountains in the distance turn hazy in a deep, burnished blue. The landscape was just so vast, so enveloping. We were awestruck, I think.

That first winter, it was so cold and bleak. We knew we had to clear a patch of earth, and there were so many diseased ash trees that had to be felled. All of this was such a big job, and at times felt bigger than we intended.

Christopher and I describe that swamp-like scene that followed as a Martian landscape. Bare, brown clay, sad tree stumps and silence. It was intimidating. It felt very empty all of a sudden.

We had no plan, no expertise and yet a stubborn determination that we would try. That was 2016. Looking back, it was the beginning of a big change for us, and the start of our brand, Gardenheir. This journey – this process – has shaped us so much.

Eventually, when the clearance was complete and that mountain view opened up, we knew we’d made the right call. As warmer days came, it felt like a gift – stark, beautiful and humbling. Full of possibility.

It all started with the pond – The heart of the garden

It really all began with the garden pond. When we cleared the ash trees, we were left with a barren swath of land that felt impossible to fill. We grew up in Florida, always close to water, and the property already had a rushing creek. Both Christopher and I felt it seemed natural to anchor the space with a pond.

At first, it was a disaster – a vast, empty clay hole. We imagined all of our new neighbours driving by, wondering what these city people had done. For a while, it felt like we’d built a skate park, not a garden.

But then the water began to settle. The springs filled it naturally, without liners, and slowly life crept in. We planted waterlilies and other marginals, like water irises and arrowheads, and soon frogs and insects arrived.

Birds tend to gather at the pond's edges. We also swim there in summer. What started as a design intervention to balance the mountain view became something much larger – an entire ecosystem. The beating heart of our garden.

Introducing water changed everything. Around the pond, things slowly began to take shape. We began to plant beds and carve paths. At its softer edges, natives wandered in, while the plants we brought in spilled outward.

I think the dialogue between cultivated and wild is best illustrated here, at this part of the garden, and it is this push and pull that continues to shape our garden today.

Listening to the land – Responding to our surroundings

Like many beginner gardeners, our first instinct was to plant the romantic garden that we had imagined for so long. Of course, we turned to the usual suspects: roses, lavender and tulips, and a whole host of charming cottage garden plants. The land, however, had other ideas.

Most of those plants did not fare well. Despite our best efforts, many struggled or died, unable to cope with the heavy clay soil, or, if the soil didn't prove too difficult for them, most were devoured by deer.

We don't have fences here, so the deer remain our constant collaborators and our greatest thieves. They eat what they want, even the water lilies in our pond this summer. At first, it was maddening. But over time, we learned to accept it.

Christopher and I like to say whoever gets to the lettuce first, gets it. That became our philosophy: share the space, adjust, and plant what will endure. Of course, sometimes it is infuriating, but it is a good lesson to learn. Nature will always win.

While we wanted to persevere with roses and tulips, at some point, we just realised it wasn’t human error or something we were doing wrong. We had to listen to the land to gauge what we should and could grow. This is the biggest lesson, really. It is more about what will survive here, in our garden at the edge.

What thrived surprised us. Daffodils, for example, love it here. Though I had never loved them before, they became a mainstay. Now, both Christopher and I have fallen for their scent and the way they light up the early season when the landscape is still bare.

In recent years, we have grown Narcissus 'Thalia' and Narcissus poeticus, both of which have white flowers and, we think, are some of the best varieties of Narcissus bulbs. And, most importantly, the deer leave them well alone.

Native plants also have a big part in our garden. Asters and goldenrods, Joe Pye weeds and bee balms, all weaving their way along the garden's edges. It softens the border between the wild and the cultivated. Ironweeds, too, which produce royal purple flower spikes throughout the season.

Walking to the garden – Journeying through the land

One of the things I love most is the journey to the garden itself. The garden isn't on our doorstep – you have to venture there, all in the view of the misty Catskills mountains. It is both humbling and freeing to find yourself in a landscape so vast.

From the house, we cross a small bridge over a natural creek. The planting is free and loose here, allowing space for shrubs and trees to breathe and grow.

Beyond, the paths shift with the seasons. Christopher and I mow new routes each year through the meadow, changing how we engage with the grounds and how the space unfolds.

Because of this, we notice different things, seeing how new wildflowers volunteer themselves among the grass. Or perhaps catch a tree or shrub from a different angle, noticing something unseen before.

Our way of working feels less like imposing a design and more like responding to what’s already there, noticing which plants want to take hold, and giving them room to thrive. Of course, there’s still some intention there, and quite a diversity of plantings we've introduced, but we prefer a light touch.

That instinct to edit rather than impose may stem from our backgrounds in the creative arts. And, the more time we spend outside, the more I think how similar the act of gardening is to the processes we both valued as artists.

Both Christopher and I enjoy the produce of all this, the flowers, fruits and vegetables in summer. But I think we have both come to understand that we really love the process, the labor involved, the trials and endeavors that go into creating something. The garden does provide all of those things. It is nourishing for both of us.

What has emerged is a garden that feels like a collaboration between us and the land itself. A living composition, I think. Forever unfinished, forever changing, but all the richer for it.

I often think back to the advice we heard from an older gardener when we were starting on this journey: plant trees early, don’t wait. We regret not doing that sooner.

The birches, serviceberries and smoke bushes we have added are still young, but they will grow old with us. Watching them root here in the Catskills, thriving despite this challenging soil and climate, has taught us patience. To value the slower things, and to simply appreciate our time here.

You can follow Gardenheir via Instagram.

For more inspiration, you can read another of our Garden Diaries, this time with Pom Shillingford, who created an English Cottage Garden in rural Connecticut.

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Garden Diaries is our new series where we share inspiring stories of designing and cultivating a stunning garden space. We explore how creatives, designers and tastemakers have grown a deeply personal space, inviting creativity, learning and happiness in their gardens, and how they live in these spaces.

In the first winter after moving to rural Connecticut, Pom Shillingford stood at her kitchen window each morning and stared out at very little. There were no flower beds. No hedges. Just a barren scene of bare earth and old, haunting trees pressing in against a wide, empty sky. 'There was very little in the way of a garden, it was just grass,' she remembers.

'All winter, I looked out from that kitchen window, thinking about what I wanted to see. A garden of my own, made from nothing.' Every sightline, every idea began from that view. 'The whole garden was imagined and designed from that kitchen window,' Pom says. What began as bare soil that first winter would eventually become a deeply personal English flower garden. A nostalgic, romantic space, full of tumbling sweet peas and dinner plate dahlias.

'I like structure,' Pom says, 'but I like chaos more. Abundant, wild floral chaos within crisp yew hedging – what could be better?' Over the years, these garden ideas would grow into a sanctuary for her family to enjoy, but also, it would become the foundation of her seasonal cut flower business, English Garden Grown. But the roots of all this go back much further, to Pom's childhood.

Garden memories of childhood – The scent of a greenhouse

In the first winter after we moved to rural Connecticut, I stood at my kitchen window each morning and stared out at very little. No flower beds. No hedges. Just a barren stretch of grass and old, overgrown trees pressing against the house. I also wasn't prepared for the grass turning completely brown here in winter.

Despite how depressing it was, I was imagining what could be. I’d look out and think, what do I want to see here? The garden was designed entirely from that one sightline. I imagined flower beds and hedges and color. I wanted a garden of my own, grown from nothing.

Now, that garden is a real place. Full of yew hedging and sweet peas, fruit trees and chaos. It’s nostalgic, a bit romantic, and very personal. I like structure. But I like chaos more; abundant, wild floral chaos within crisp lines. That’s what I’ve built here.

I grew up in England, in Hampshire, in a big blended family. But I was closest to my father’s mother. She lived in the same village we moved to, and her garden shaped everything.

She had an Arts & Crafts–style house with a garden full of yew-lined rooms. There was a formal rose garden, an orchard that buzzed in spring, a special bonfire room, and hedges with secret holes we’d crawl through. The apple store was terrifying, mice, cobwebs, brown apples by February. But that was part of the charm.

What I remember most is the scent. That sticky, green smell of tomato vines in the greenhouse – it’s still the scent of home for me. That greenhouse was attached to my grandfather’s art studio and filled with pots, cobwebs and a water tank coated in green slime.

Walter, the gardener (and village postman), tolerated me. I was always underfoot, touching everything I wasn’t supposed to. But I wanted to learn. I think I started learning about gardening then.

I didn’t realise it at the time, but that garden planted something in me. It lay semi-dormant through the years in Chicago and New York, until one gray Connecticut winter, looking out of the kitchen window, it had the chance to flourish again.

Setting down foundations – Building a new garden in Connecticut

By the time we decided to leave Manhattan, we were five floors up with three kids and a deep need for both more space and more nature in our lives. It was insanity. I told my husband, David, I’m done. We have to get out.

We weren’t planning on rural northwest Connecticut. But we found ourselves putting in an offer on a run-down 1830s farmhouse, mostly for the land. It was three and a half acres of mess. Overgrown pines, towering hemlocks, dark, and overbearing. But I looked at it and thought: If we clear this, I could create a memory garden, my granny’s garden.

We moved in that November. From then until Easter, I stood at that same kitchen window, staring out and planning. A deer fence was the first non-negotiable. Before anything else, even before having a working kitchen inside, I had this installed. Because otherwise, the deer just destroy everything in New England. My flowers and shrubs wouldn't have lasted a week.

The following April, we dug our first flowerbeds and planted a line of yew hedges. Then we added another 'room.' Then an orchard, because, of course, I needed an orchard.

We did it in manageable chunks. We had no money, no time, and not much of a clue. People thought we were mad. But the vision kept going. We added structure because the winters here are brutal, everything goes brown by November and doesn’t really come back until April. I knew I needed something architectural to hold it all.

Yew is my favourite. I love the crisp lines, how dark and solid it looks when freshly cut. David does all the topiary now, it’s his thing. He clips, I fill. He trims the edges, and I go wild inside them.

What we’ve created isn’t an American yard, really. It’s a garden. I see it as an extension of our home, not something to control or minimize. It’s where we live, where everything happens.

I think, much like my granny's garden, what we have created isn't a manicured or overly precious space. It is very much alive. Full of bees, blossom, dense hedging, wildflowers. It feels free and ordered at the same time.

And, alongside all of this, there are my flowers. An abundance of flowers. Sweet peas and dahlias, cosmos and peonies, thousands of tulips emerging in one breathless wave each spring.

Order and chaos – Flower growing in New England

The flower beds I first imagined from the kitchen window eventually exploded. Sweet peas on hazel wigwams, cosmos swaying, nasturtiums spilling onto the paths.

In 2020, during lockdown, I took a six-week course and decided to give flower farming a real go. I’d always loved flowers, but I’d never thought of it as a job. Then I saw what was local flowers were on offer here. The few seasonal offerings that didn’t feel special, and I thought: I can do better than this. I can create something beautiful.

So, I started English Garden Grown, my seasonal flower business. What started off as a once-a-year offering a year of tulips has ramped up year on year. Outside, things begin around late April or May, and last until late October. But as our winters are so long, I have become a huge proponent of forced winter bulbs.

Hyacinths come first. ‘Gypsy Queen’ is my favourite this year, all peach and scent. Then tulips arrive in a mad, brilliant wave.

‘El Niño’ is wild and fiery, ‘Spring Green’ is quietly elegant, and ‘Flamingo Queen’ is ruffled and pink, a proper joy. I grew about 10,000 this year, and I think that is my limit.

By the end of May, though, I’m slightly tulip-mad. One more arrangement and I might scream.

I grow Fritillaria persica too. Dark, candelabra-like blooms that twist toward the light. I love that wildness. I’d take a fritillaria over a supermarket rose any day.

And cow parsley, those delicate white umbels and a cottage-garden feel. It is an airy thing. It reminds me of home. It’s so English, so magical. A little drift of the English countryside, here in Connecticut.

As one flower fades, another rises. That rhythm has taught me everything. Patience. Trust. Letting go. My grandmother always grew sweet peas, and I grow them now too. Too many colours for floristry, and it’s often too hot here for them, but I grow them anyway.

I give them as gifts. You can’t find sweet peas here, and when I hand someone a bunch, their reaction is always so intense. It’s like memory rushes in all at once. That’s what I love about flowers. That’s why I grow them.

We’ve been here for twelve years now. And we’re still tinkering. Still learning. Still changing things. David’s topiary is immaculate, and I’m not allowed to touch it. He’s also become a fruit tree pruning obsessive. He taught himself by watching videos of elderly cider farmers in Somerset.

I think back to collecting rose petals to make potpourri in my granny's garden, and when we all helped shell peas and top-and-tail redcurrants. We use our garden here now much the same. We are always doing something in the garden; it is just part of life. Food, flowers, smells. It is our everyday, really.

What began as a vision from a kitchen window has become a living, growing being. A whole world of scent and memory and movement. Built slowly, season by season, from the ground up.

If my garden could talk? I think it would say: She’s still learning. Still growing into the space. Some things work. Some don’t. I have found patience in it all.

You can follow Pom and English Garden Grown on Instagram.

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Garden Diaries is our new series where we share inspiring stories of designing and cultivating a stunning garden space. We explore how creatives, designers and tastemakers have grown a deeply personal space, inviting creativity, learning and happiness in their gardens, and how they live in these spaces.