The first thing I ever grew all by myself as a child was a potato. I stuck a sprouted one in the black dirt behind our old barn to see what would happen. A few months later, having forgotten all about it, I came across many beautiful, little bright red potatoes right where I had planted just the one. It was positively magical! By my mid-teens, my goal was to become a professional gardener. My roundabout way of accomplishing that was to head to Japan after college to find a master gardener to apprentice to. Somehow, that actually worked out. For two years I was apprentice gardener to one Toru Kojima, who introduced me with considerable patience to the techniques of Japanese pruning, bamboo fence building and garden maintenance. I developed discipline as a gardener and an appreciation for the quiet, distilled sense of nature found in so many of the gardens there that I love to this day. That was my formal training to be sure, but the real foundation of my gardening practice as it is today were the woods, fields, streams and ponds of my childhood- and my failed search for the rare trailing arbutus, for which I looked and looked but never found.

For the past 35 years, I have gardened extensively in the Midwest and in the San Francisco Bay Area, in both private and public settings. In California, I had the pleasure and privilege to work as garden manager of the world-renowned Ruth Bancroft Garden, an experience which honed my understanding of the garden as an art form, and the discipline and commitment required to both create and steward something truly great.

Today my focus is the ecology of gardens and finding creative ways to design them so they serve the needs and aesthetic demands of my clients while doing right by the local ecosystem. I think and talk a lot about soil and find what is going on under our feet every bit as fascinating and delicious as what we can see above ground.

I currently garden and live in the Chicago area with my husband, sculptor Erik Blome, and an array of pets and plants.