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, Sugar Hill, will take years to become the garden I 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. I’m learning what works, what fails, and what belongs in this landscape.

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

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. I visited the gardens at Hidcote, Sissinghurst, Kiftgate Court.

These are not simply beautiful places. They are 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 they each created work that still holds meaning. Their ideas are still studied. They are tested, adapted, and considered through the work happening here in Kentucky.

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 as well as the ideas and traditions that continue to shape my work.