Someday, this post is really going to date this time: spring 2020, the strangest one a lot of us have lived through.

if you have a gardener in your life, I promise, these items would be received with rejoicing.

The challenge is to take the spirit of the abundantly blooming, effervescent English garden and translate it to something that is both possible with climate and plant palette here in the Southeastern US.

I've been here before: standing in front of a door and not sure exactly how to walk through it, but knowing that I have to.

The garden is a laboratory, a learning process, a living thing. Since March just ended, I’ll summarize a few things that happened last month.

An idea that has always inspired us, especially in moving into an older home (ours is 1951) where so, so many things need work and nothing is quite pristine, is that if it’s good enough for a cottage in the English countryside, it’s good enough for us.

Because the interplay of what’s blooming when is so specific to place and even to season, I wanted a way to see at a glance what was happening.

This is a personal essay I wrote for TOWN Carolina’s March 2020 issue about the time I spent at Great Dixter House & Gardens last summer.

I’m changing careers. That's the short answer. But since this came as a surprise to many, I want to offer some backstory.