About Garden Moxie

Garden Moxie is built on the belief that gardening is a serious creative discipline—one that unfolds over time, through observation, revision, and care.

The work

I’m Sue Libertiny, a mechanical engineer who stepped away from a career to build a garden on twenty acres of Kentucky land.
This is long-term work.

The land my husband and I are building on—Sugar Hill—will take decades to become what I can already see in my mind. That timeline, which once felt daunting, now feels like the whole point.

In the meantime, I work at Rabbit Run, a smaller, temporary garden where I test ideas in real conditions—learning what holds, what fails, and what belongs in this landscape.

Everything is documented. The failures as carefully as the successes. The revisions as carefully as the plans.

How It Started

It began with a handful of perennial divisions from a friend. I was newly married, with the first garden of my own. The plants were familiar—I had watched my mother and grandmother garden—but this time, the work was mine. They grew. They were beautiful. And something that had been quiet in me for a long time stopped being quiet.

A Turning Point

That early curiosity deepened when I visited England—Hidcote, Sissinghurst, Kiftgate Court.

These were not simply beautiful places. They were complete worlds, each shaped by someone who was committed to making something enduring.

Walking through them, I kept returning to one question: Why aren’t more gardens in America made this way? That question continues to shape the work at Garden Moxie.

In The Tradition

The gardeners I return to are those who treated gardening as a serious craft:

Each approached the garden differently—but all created work that still holds meaning. Their ideas are not studied at a distance. They are tested, adapted, and considered through the work happening here in Kentucky.

What Garden Moxie Is

Garden Moxie is a record of a process — the building of a garden over time, the decisions behind it, and the ideas that continue to shape it. This is slow work. If you are drawn to gardens not just as decoration, but as something made—intentionally, over time—you are in the right place.

Garden Moxie Field Notes

If you’d like to follow the garden as it unfolds, Garden Moxie Field Notes is a letter that arrives every other week. Each issue records what is happening in the garden in real time—alongside the ideas and traditions that continue to shape the work.