Stop Fighting Your Garden
What if the secret to a beautiful garden isn’t better soil or more effort, but better design and plant choices? Garden Moxie is where gardeners learn to think like designers and work with the land.
A Different Way To Garden
For a long time, I asked myself what I wanted to grow, then forced my garden to accommodate those plants. I amended soil, irrigated, fertilized, and intervened whenever things didn’t go to plan.
I’m starting to think we have this backwards.
What if we started listening to the site (the soil, moisture, and climate) and choose plants that actually want to live there? Then use the principles of good design to turn those plants into something beautiful.
This is my work at Garden Moxie.
Rabbit Run: The Experiment
Rabbit Run is my laboratory. It’s a temporary garden planted in unamended Kentucky clay soil. This is where I am testing a simple and powerful idea:
What happens when we stop trying to make our site suit our plants and instead choose plants that want to live there? Then arrange them with attention and care?
Some plants thrive. Others will fail. Everything is documented. This will never be a perfect garden, but the observation, revisions, and learning will help shape my permanent garden at Sugar Hill.
I’m Sue Libertiny. A mechanical engineer who traded a career solving other people’s problems for a slower life building a garden in Kentucky.
Garden Moxie Field Notes
Garden Moxie Field Notes is a record of my Kentucky garden as it unfolds. Every other week I share the design principles guiding my choices, the plants being trialed, the failures and the keepers, and whatever else the season brings.
Latest from the Garden
I’ve spent the whole summer following the progress of my Rabbit Run trial garden. I purposely didn’t amend the clay soil, hoping to find plants that would survive without spending money on extras like compost and fertilizer. This has turned into one of the great gardening discoveries yet.
Start Here: Design foundations
If you are new to Garden Moxie, begin with the foundations of great garden design. These are not quick tips. They are the enduring principles that help us create spaces that feel complete and beautiful across the seasons.
Start with the Bones
Why structure matters more than plants
Timeless Design Principles
The elements that make a garden feel whole
What Great Gardens Teach Us
Lessons from the designers who built them