Gardening is a serious creative practice.
It’s time we treated it that way.
Garden Moxie is for gardeners who want to build something extraordinary — slowly, intentionally, and full of creativity.
It started with a friend and a handful of perennial divisions.
She was dividing plants from her own garden and offered me some. I was newly married, newly housed, and had grown up watching my mother and grandmother garden — so the plants were familiar, but the garden was mine for the first time. They grew. They looked beautiful. And something that had been quiet in me for a long time stopped being quiet.
I wasn’t thinking about artistic gardens then. I wasn’t thinking about design philosophy or color theory or the long tradition of people who had made extraordinary things from soil and time. I was just growing beautiful flowers and finding that I couldn’t stop thinking about them.
Then I went to England.
Hidcote Manor. Sissinghurst Castle. Kiftgate Court.
I walked through those gardens and felt something shift — the feeling of encountering a thing that shows you what’s possible. These weren’t just beautiful places. They were complete worlds, each one created by someone who decided, with full commitment and without apology, to make something extraordinary.
Standing there, I kept asking the same question: why aren’t more Americans gardening like this? That question is what Garden Moxie is trying to answer. I might not succeed. But I’m definitely going to try.
I’m a mechanical engineer who traded a career solving other people’s problems for 20 acres of cattle-grazed land in Kentucky. My husband and I are building a new home.
We’re calling it Sugar Hill. It will take ten to twenty years for the garden to become what I can see in my mind — and that timeline, which once felt daunting, now feels like the whole point.
In the meantime, I’m experimenting in a small temporary plot called Rabbit Run, where I’m learning to grow in Kentucky’s heavy clay soil, testing plant combinations before I commit those decisions to Sugar Hill. I document everything — the failures as carefully as the successes, the revisions as carefully as the plans.
The garden is also a source for creativity. I make cyanotypes, block prints, and wreaths from what the seasons produce. I study historical gardeners who approached gardening as a serious craft and left behind a body of work still worth learning: Gertrude Jekyll, who worked the garden like a painter working a canvas. William Robinson, who championed wildness at a time when it was considered improper. Vita Sackville-West, who built Sissinghurst around romance and an unapologetic passion for plants. These were not people who gardened. They were artists. That is what I’m after.
Garden Moxie is for people who know that our gardens are connected to something bigger. Gardens tell us how a life can be lived. If you’re tired of content that treats gardening as a series of “hacks” and you want to garden with intention, patience and genuine creative ambition — you found the right place. Welcome!
Garden Moxie Field Notes is a newsletter where I share what I’m learning, making, and revising as the seasons unfold. If this sounds like your kind of thing, I’d love to have you along.