<h5>Why fall is the true beginning of the garden year in Middle Tennessee, and when to start a commission if you want to be living in your garden by spring.</h5><p>The red maples on my farm turn first. Every year, sometime in the middle of September, weeks before anyone is ready to admit summer is over, a single branch goes red like a struck match. Nobody else notices. Pool floats are still out. The county fair just finished. But the maples know, and once you have lived with a piece of land long enough, you know too: the year has turned, and the real work is about to begin.</p><p>Here is the thing almost nobody in my industry will say plainly. Everyone believes the garden year begins in spring. It does not. Spring is when gardens are photographed. Gardens are made in the fall.</p><h6>Spring is the marketing season. Fall is the planting season.</h6><p>Every March, the same thing happens. The weather breaks, the daffodils come up, the garden centers fill their lots, and my inbox fills with people who have just walked outside, looked around, and decided this is the year. I understand it completely. Spring is persuasive. Spring is the land's own advertising campaign.</p><p>But spring planting is an industry convenience, not a horticultural one. It exists because that is when the nursery trucks arrive, when landscape crews mobilize, when homeowners feel the itch. The entire machine is built around the moment you feel motivated, not the moment the plants actually want to go in the ground.</p><h6>Why fall planting wins in Tennessee clay.</h6><p>In October, our clay soil is still holding the warmth of the whole summer. The air has cooled, the rain has returned, and a tree planted now has exactly one job: roots. It is not trying to push leaves. It is not trying to flower. It is not trying to survive 96 degrees while establishing itself in the ground. All of its energy goes down, into the dark, into the specific clay of your specific property, all through our mild winters, when the ground here rarely freezes deep.</p><p>Now run the comparison. A tree planted in April gets about ten weeks of root growth before July arrives, and July in Nashville is not a season; it is an interrogation. A tree planted in October gets eight or nine months. By the time the heat comes, the fall-planted tree has already moved in. The spring-planted tree is still living out of boxes.</p><h6>The math nobody explains until it is too late.</h6><p>A garden designed the way I design them cannot be conjured in three weeks. I do not say that to be precious about it. I say it because the calendar is simply the calendar, and I would rather you hear it in July than discover it in April.</p><p>Here is what a great commission actually requires. Time on your land: walking it, listening to what it is already doing, testing the soil, understanding where the water goes and where the light lands at the hours you will actually be outside. Then the design itself: the thinking, the drawing, the plant sourcing, the revisions. Then installation has to be scheduled, and the good crews in this town book out months ahead.</p><p>If you reach out in July or August, we walk your property in late summer, design through early fall, and your garden goes into the ground in the October to December window. In April, while your neighbours are standing in line at the garden center, you are watching a landscape wake up that has been quietly deepening its roots for six months.</p><p>If you wait until March, here is what actually happens, and I say this with love: you will not get a spring garden. You will get a spring conversation. The honest arrival point for a project that begins in March is the fall planting window, which is where we would have started anyway, half a year earlier.</p><h6>What the land is doing while you decide.</h6><p>A garden planted in the fall spends its first six months invisible. And those are the six months that determine everything. All winter, while the surface shows you nothing, bare branches, cut stems, mulch, patience, the roots are moving through the clay. The garden is happening. It is just happening where you cannot see it.</p><p>Then one morning in late March, you walk outside, and the whole thing arrives at once, and it looks like magic, and it is not. It is the visible result of a decision made back when the maples first turned, by someone willing to trust the part of the work that does not reveal itself for six months.</p><p>The garden you want next May does not exist yet. Right now it is only a decision. Make it in the fall, and spring is simply the reveal.</p>

The spring garden is decided in September

<h5>Restoration implies an original state to return to. The land does not want its past self. It wants to be in right relationship with its present conditions.</h5><p>There is a question I have started asking every client who arrives at our first meeting with the word rewilding already in their mouths, already certain it is what they want. Which former glory?</p><p>They pause. And then I ask it more specifically: do you mean the land as it existed before your house was built? Before the subdivision? Before the farm that preceded it? Before European settlement? Before the hardwood forest that covered this basin ten thousand years ago, or the sea that preceded that?</p><p>Because the land you are standing on has been everything. And rewilding, as the design industry is currently selling it, asks you to return it to something, without ever specifying what that something is, or whether it ever existed in the form you are imagining.</p><h6>The creek that refused.</h6><p>I once visited a property where the clients had spent tens of thousands of dollars having their creek cleared and cleaned, the banks stripped bare and reseeded with fescue. They wanted it to look managed. Tended. Intentional. What they got instead was a lesson the land had been trying to teach them from the beginning.</p><p>Within three months the banks were deteriorating. The fescue would not hold. They reseeded. It failed again. Each time the creek shrugged off the grass like a horse shrugging off a fly, and each time the clients responded by arguing with it more loudly, with more seed, more money, more insistence that the land become what they had decided it should be.</p><p>What had been on those banks before the clearing? Goldenrod. Native bluestems. Plants that had spent centuries learning exactly how to hold that particular soil at that particular angle above that particular water. The land was not failing. The land was refusing. There is a difference, and it is the most important thing I know about working with a piece of ground.</p><h6>Laundered through aesthetics.</h6><p>Rewilding arrived in luxury residential design the way most ideas arrive: laundered through aesthetics until the philosophy behind it became decorative. You can see it in every design publication right now: the soft grasses, the undulating meadow, the artful disorder. We let the land lead, the captions say. Beneath the photography, someone installed all of it in a weekend.</p><p>I understand the appeal. After decades of over-installed, over-controlled residential landscapes, something in us is right to want the opposite. The rebellion makes sense. What does not make sense is calling it restoration.</p><p>Restoration implies an original state to return to. It is, at its core, a nostalgic proposition. And nostalgia has never been a reliable design philosophy, because the past it reaches for is always invented. When I walk a property for the first time, I am not looking for evidence of what it used to be. I am looking for what it is already trying to become.</p><h6>It requires you to make peace with death.</h6><p>Real rewilding, the kind that is an actual relationship with a piece of land, relies on death remaining visible. The dead perennial standing alone in January. The fallen leaves uncollected in the beds through December. The spent grass skeleton holding its shape in the frost. They are the mechanism of the ecosystem. They are where the overwintering insects live, where the birds feed, where next year's soil is being made.</p><p>Most clients do not know this when they say they want rewilding. They are imagining the high season version, always in bloom, always full. They have not yet considered that rewilding asks them to renegotiate their definition of clean. To find beauty in decomposition. If you cannot love it in January, you do not actually want a garden. You want a photo shoot.</p><p>The land does not need to be restored. It needs to be considered, designed for the best version of its current self, with a designer willing to follow its lead rather than impose a fantasy of its past. My client's creek knew. It knew the whole time. It was just waiting for someone to listen.</p>

What rewilding gets wrong

<h5>Most gardens fail not because of the wrong plants, but because of the wrong question. I stopped asking what should go in this bed, and started asking what is happening here at seven in the morning.</h5><p>Most garden design starts with space. Where does the sun hit? How big is the bed? What goes in the back, what goes in the front, what fills the middle? The whole process is organized around the garden as a physical object. I used to design that way. I know better now.</p><p>The shift happened on my farm in Smith County, not on a client property. I had been living there for three years before I planted anything, three years of watching, which is the practice I call Land Portraiture. And what I realized, after all that watching, is that I did not experience my land in terms of space. I experienced it in terms of time.</p><p>Morning coffee on the porch, eight o'clock, late June. The hummingbirds are already holding a meeting with the snapdragons. The light is gold and coming from the east, which means the garden beds have three more hours in full shade. That is a completely different garden than the one that exists at two in the afternoon, when the sun is overhead and the shade under my covered porch is the only place worth being. Same property. Same plants. Two entirely different experiences separated by six hours.</p><h6>What inhabitation design actually means</h6><p>It is a time-based approach that organizes every decision around how a person lives their actual, not idealistic, life on their land, hour by hour, season by season. Instead of starting with a site plan and filling in plants, it starts with the rhythms of the people who live there and designs the landscape to meet them where they already are.</p><p>Conventional design asks: what is the focal point of this garden? Where do we need screening? What is the colour palette for this border? Instead, I ask: where are you standing at seven in the morning with your coffee? What do you see from the kitchen window while you are cooking dinner? When you come home in the dark in January, what does the path to your front door feel like?</p><p>The first set of questions produces a beautiful garden. The second set produces a beautiful life. They are not the same thing.</p><h6>The problem with spatial design</h6><p>There is nothing wrong with spatial design as a tool. I use it. You need to understand sun exposure, drainage, soil conditions, sight lines, scale, proportion. Those are non-negotiable. But spatial design, used alone, has a blind spot. It produces gardens that are designed to be looked at, not lived in.</p><p>I walked a property in Williamson County last year where a client had a marble patio with a beautifully designed border around it. It looked stunning. But they never use it, because it faces south-west, and from May through September it is in direct sun at exactly the hours they would want to be outside, five to eight in the evening. Nobody designed for the hour. They designed for the space.</p><p>Or a property with an incredible front garden, massed natives and ornamental grasses, great structure, year-round interest. The homeowner sees it for thirty seconds a day, walking to their car. The back of the house, where they spend every evening, has a lawn and a fence and nothing else.</p><h6>The golden hours</h6><p>Roughly five in the afternoon to half past eight, May through September, is the single most important design window for most Nashville residential properties. And it is the one that gets the least attention, because conventional design does not think in time.</p><p>I design for this hour obsessively. What direction does the evening light come from on your property? Where does it land? What plants catch it and glow? Little bluestem turns copper and gold in evening light; if it is positioned where the western sun hits it, it is breathtaking. If it is on the east side of the house, you will never see it do that.</p><h6>The forgotten garden</h6><p>Almost nobody designs a garden for what happens after sunset. This is the biggest missed opportunity in residential landscape design. Colour fades. Shapes and silhouettes become characters of their own. Fragrance intensifies. The daytime pollinators have hurried off and the nighttime orchestra begins.</p><p>White and pale yellow flowers become luminous at dusk. Oakleaf hydrangea, white coneflowers, Moonbeam coreopsis, white phlox. They catch the last light and seem to glow when everything else has gone dark. I plant white flowers along paths and near seating areas specifically for this hour, so they become natural wayfinding after dark.</p><p>Lighting matters enormously here, and most landscape lighting is terrible. Overlighting a garden kills the dusk experience. You do not want to eliminate the dark. You want to shape it.</p><h6>How this changes the first conversation</h6><p>When I sit down with a new client, I do not start with show me your property. I start with walk me through your day. When do you wake up? Where do you go first? Where do your kids play after school? Where do you sit in the evening? Do you go outside after dark?</p><p>These questions feel personal. They are personal. A garden designed for living has to know the people living in it. A garden for a couple who eats dinner outside at seven every night is a fundamentally different design than a garden for a family with three kids who are in the backyard from half past three until dark.</p><p>This is also where Land Portraiture and Inhabitation Design connect. Land Portraiture is how I learn what the property is already doing at every hour. Inhabitation Design is how I layer the human experience onto what the land is already doing. The land has its own clock. The people have their own clock. My job is to synchronize them.</p><h6>This approach requires honesty</h6><p>It only works if you are willing to be honest about how you actually live. Not the version that looks good on paper, where you host outdoor dinner parties every weekend. Which might mean admitting that you never eat dinner outside because the mosquitoes are unbearable, and you have not addressed that. Or that the reading garden you asked for will never get used because you actually read in bed.</p><p>I ask clients questions that sometimes make them pause. Do you go outside after dark? Long silence. No. Why not? Longer silence. I do not know. There is nothing out there. That nothing out there is the design brief. That silence is where the garden begins.</p>

Inhabitation design: why the hour is the true unit of garden design

<h5>It is not a site analysis or a survey. It is a practice of sustained presence with land that changes you, and the changed version of you sees what is actually true about a place.</h5><p>I moved to my farm in Smith County from East Nashville. I do not think I ever once even noticed a bird at my house there, unless it flew into my window and died by the front door. I was a different person before this land got hold of me.</p><p>The house on my farm sits on top of a hill. When I first saw it, the hollies were overgrown years past the point of caring for them. The ash trees had all gone to borer and were standing there like ghosts taking up space that the cedars and maples around them were clearly angry about. The copperheads had turned the back cement porch into their own personal tanning deck. The fields rolling out below were nothing but neglected grass. No blooms. No colour. And the lowest wet ground at the bottom was bare. Not even grass. Just mud.</p><p>I did not plant anything for three years.</p><p>I would love to tell you that was intentional. That I had a philosophy about observation and I was executing it with discipline. But I was just overwhelmed. I had come from pavement and noise and screens to this hilltop full of dead things and land I did not have the first conversation with yet. So I walked it. Over and over. I watched the water in April and the weeds in June and they told completely different stories. I watched the light shift from June to November and nothing about it was what I would have guessed. I walked so much that the deer started to know my route before I did.</p><h6>The volume changed</h6><p>Somewhere in all of that, something happened that I was not planning nor expecting. I got quiet. I mean my actual volume changed. The internal noise, the opinions and arguments and comparisons that come from screens and phones, started to thin out. And in the space that opened up, I started hearing things I had never heard. Not metaphorically. The birds. The insects. The wind doing different things in different parts of the property. The land had been talking the entire time. I just could not hear it over myself.</p><p>My third summer, I planted a pollinator garden. Not because I was inspired by an Instagram gardener. Because I had finally noticed the absence. All that grass and not one bloom. Of course the bees were gone. I planted, and that first month the bees came like they had been waiting somewhere nearby for someone to remember them. Every year since, more come.</p><p>The willow took four years. Four years of looking at that bare wet hollow where nothing would grow before I was certain enough to put something in the ground there. It is thriving now. Because I did not guess. I waited until I understood what the ground needed and was holding space for.</p><h6>Watering by hand</h6><p>The limestone underneath Smith County is why I started to water everything by hand. Running irrigation would mean trenching through rock, and the disruption to the land would be violence dressed up as convenience. So I water. Every day in the summer, with a hose, by hand. And I grew to love that time in a way I never could have predicted. Watering is when I see things. The plant that is stressed. The one that is reaching toward light I had not noticed. Watering became my daily silent conversation with the ground, and I would not trade it for any system.</p><p>Here is what I know now that I could not have known from living downtown. The land studies you back. The deer bed down in my woods every night now, and every season their numbers grow. They did not come because I designed a habitat. They came because I became quiet and safe. The copperheads did not leave because I fought them. I cleared the overgrowth and the deadwood and the concrete tanning deck that made the porch their kind of place, and it became my kind of place, and they moved on. The land renegotiated.</p><h6>Bringing it to other people's land</h6><p>This is what I call land portraiture. It is not a site analysis or a survey. It is a practice of sustained presence with land that changes you. And the changed version of you sees what is actually true about a place. What is missing. What is waiting. What is already there and just needs someone to finally notice it and respond.</p><p>A new client had already decided where her pavilion was going. Lowest point on the property, right where the water pools and sits after a big rain. I had been on the land for an afternoon. The pavilion needed to be on the opposite end of the property entirely. It would block the neighbour's storage shed from her home's best view off the hilltop and would not require a new access path. That access path would have been exactly where the sunset hits. That is not pathway ground. That is where you light a fire, pour some wine, and watch a sunset. She had owned the land for years. I just knew what to listen for.</p><p>The garden design comes after that. But it cannot come right without it. The extended time I spend on a site is not a luxury or an inefficiency. It is the whole method. Because over months and seasons, I do not just learn the property. I learn the people living on it. My farm taught me that before I ever had a name for it. I spent years becoming someone who could see what the land already knew. And now I bring that seeing to yours.</p>

Land portraiture

<h5>Hiring a garden designer is not like hiring a contractor, where you approve a quote and see the result at the end. Good design is decided slowly and revealed quickly.</h5><p>Most people have hired a contractor at some point. Maybe a painter, a roofer, someone to redo a bathroom. The process is familiar: get a quote, approve it, show up at the end and see how it turned out.</p><p>Hiring a garden designer is different. It is more personal, more collaborative, and more involved than most people expect, in a good way. But if you have never done it, it can feel unclear. What actually happens? How long does it take? What do you need to have figured out before you call?</p><h6>It starts with a conversation, not a contract</h6><p>Before anything is drawn, signed, or scheduled, there is a conversation. A good designer wants to hear about your property, how you use it, what is bothering you about it, and what you are hoping for. This is not a sales call. It is both sides figuring out whether the fit is right.</p><p>A designer who skips this step and jumps straight to a quote is solving a problem she has not understood yet. At The Grass Girl, every project starts with a phone call. If that conversation confirms we are a good fit, we schedule a paid on-site consultation, and that is where the real work begins. I want to know about your property, but I also want to know how you live outside.</p><h6>Then comes the site visit</h6><p>Before I ever meet a client on their property, I have usually already been there. Not officially. I will drive by on my own, pull up aerial photos and old listings. I want my first impression of the land to be mine alone, without anyone else's narrative layered on top of it yet. What catches my eye when no one is pointing anything out? What is the light doing at that hour?</p><p>I am a deeply visual person. I trained as a fine artist before I became a garden designer, and I retain an almost photographic impression of a site after that first encounter. A new project will start running on its own in my head, sometimes for days, before I ever put pen to paper. I am composing while I am driving, while I am cooking dinner, while I am walking my own garden. By the time I sit down to sketch, I have already been designing.</p><p>When I do meet you on site, I am looking at things most people do not notice. The way water wants to move across your yard after a Tennessee downpour. A grade change that feels like a problem but is actually an opportunity. The angle where your back porch frames a treeline that deserves to be the focal point of the whole design. I am reading your property the way I would read a painting, as a composition with weight, balance, light, and movement.</p><h6>The design develops in stages</h6><p>The early stage is about alignment, making sure the designer and the client are seeing the same garden before anyone invests weeks of drawing time. Think of it as agreeing on the story before writing the book. This is where aesthetic direction, priorities, and scope get locked in so the design solves the right problems from the start.</p><p>How deep that early work goes depends on the project. A focused courtyard redesign is a different undertaking than a multi-acre property with grading challenges, water movement, and exposures that change dramatically across seasons. For larger or more complex sites, the designer may need to study the property over time, visiting in different seasons to understand how light moves, where water collects after a hard rain, where shade falls in June versus October. You cannot design well for a site you have only seen once on a Tuesday in March.</p><h6>What you receive at the end</h6><p>A completed garden design is not a sketch on a napkin. It is a buildable document, or set of documents, that specifies layout, plantings, materials, and intent so that a qualified contractor can execute it. The best design packages also include notes that communicate why certain decisions were made, so the design intent survives the build.</p><p>A good designer is also thinking past installation day. The garden has to work in year three, not just the week the photos are taken, so you should expect guidance on how to care for what has been designed, what needs attention and when, and how the garden will evolve over time.</p><p>I have designed and gardened in Middle Tennessee long enough now that my projects have become something like ongoing experiments, some hypotheses proven, many disproven. I know which plants will actually thrive in our clay, which ones the books say should work but will not, and which combinations look beautiful in May but leave you with nothing to look at by September. That kind of knowledge does not come from a catalog.</p><h6>How to know if you are ready</h6><p>You do not need to have everything figured out before you reach out. You do not need a Pinterest board or a plant list or a budget nailed down to the dollar. What helps most is knowing what is bothering you about your current space and having a general sense of what you want to feel when the project is finished.</p><p>If you are building a new home, the best time to bring in a garden designer is earlier than you think, ideally before the house is fully framed, so the landscape and the architecture can be designed as one experience. If you already live in the home, the best time is whenever the space starts frustrating you more than you can ignore.</p><h6>How the studio works</h6><p>I take on a handful of residential projects a year in Middle Tennessee. I work with each client individually, not with a team or a junior designer working from my notes. The process is thorough, personal, and clear. You will know what you are getting, what it costs, and how long it will take before you commit to anything.</p><p>What I am really doing is looking at your land as a piece of living art, not just a home landscape. I am exploring the site's possibilities and working with you to create something that has a foundation of permanence and beauty, something artistic and rooted in what will actually grow here and benefit the daily rhythms of your life. That takes time, and I take that time up front to do my best work.</p>

Field notes from the studio and the farm

The spring garden is decided in September

What rewilding gets wrong

Inhabitation design: why the hour is the true unit of garden design

Land portraiture

How does the garden design process work?

If you have a property and a vision, I’d like to hear about it.

Studio

Commissions

Writing