Where artistry takes root
Where artistry
takes root
Residential landscape design in Sarasota, Bradenton and nearby communities. Thoughtful gardens shaped around your home and how you live outdoors.
Residential landscape design for Sarasota, Bradenton, and nearby communities—thoughtful gardens shaped around your home and how you live outdoors.
Gardens that brought out the artist in me.
These are gardens I’ve created with homeowners, along with my own. Each reflects a different person and place. Here’s a little of what I saw and how each design came together.
The Refined Garden
Chris & Gary’s succulent garden
Chris is my neighbor and friend, and we built this garden together. I led the design, with Chris leaning on me for creative direction and plant advice along the way. She brought her own ideas and creativity, working alongside me the entire time.
We started fresh, laying fabric and framing every planting island, carefully keeping the walking paths even. We laughed, debated, got a little grumpy, talked and sweated. A lot. But most of all, we created something magical.
The fun part began when we cut the first hole in the fabric for a plant. We worked through each section, balancing color, texture and what each plant needed, imagining how everything would grow together.
I’m proud of what we built, and I still get to enjoy it every time I’m back in the garden, whether I’m working alongside Chris or caring for it for her.
The Eclectic Garden
The Eclectic Garden
The original landscaping crowded the entrance while leaving the three-car garage to carry most of the visual weight. The house wasn’t small, but the landscape made it feel that way.
I opened the center, shifted height and mass toward the outer edges of the property, and created sight lines that allowed the architecture to breathe. Repeating forms, materials and color across the frontage helped the home feel wider, more balanced and more connected to the garden.
Kathy wanted something water-wise and easy to care for - but not restrained. She loved annuals, sculptural plants, garden art and saturated color, especially purples, blues and pinks. That became the foundation of an artsy, eclectic garden built with palms for rhythm and height, succulents and boulders for structure, and bold pots and flowers that move the eye across the property.
The Eclectic Garden
We invested in larger palms to establish the height immediately, then chose smaller plants where time could do the work. Three boulders anchor the composition and give the new planting enough presence to hold its own against the architecture.
I led the project from design through sourcing and installation, including irrigation, lighting and edging. My installation team and I brought the garden to life in five working days.
Newly planted, the structure was already there. Nine months later, the garden had begun to soften and fill in - exactly as planned. It will keep changing with the flowers, the seasons and whatever Kathy discovers next.
I have always loved the odd ones. Rare plants. Unusual plants. Plants with enough personality to begin telling a story before I have decided what that story will be.
When I saw this ponytail palm, I could not take my eyes off it. Its form was strange, sculptural and a little Dr. Seuss. It spoke to me, and I knew it was meant to come home.
I did not know where it would go yet. That did not frighten me. As an artist, I am used to beginning with a blank canvas.
This was the first plant I purchased for our new home. There were no healthy trees on the property, and the one failing tree we inherited needed to come down. I saw the ponytail palm as the first piece of a compositional puzzle. Form, function, scale and movement would determine where it belonged and how the landscape would take shape around it.
It was going to anchor the property somewhere.
I simply needed to discover where.
My Garden Muse
I wanted to capture the feeling of Dr. Seuss’s work: exaggerated forms, unexpected movement and a world that follows its own slightly peculiar logic.
The ponytail palm gave me the first shape. I added two more palms to build a collection of distinctive silhouettes, then used boulders to give the composition enough weight to keep all that personality grounded.
As your eye navigates the garden, the metal carries that sense of play from one form to the next, moving through the plantings, changing shape around the center palm and opening into a spiral at either end. Like the ponytail palm itself, its path is unpredictable, but it creates a steady visual rhythm that holds the entire composition together.
As your eye navigates the garden, the metal carries that sense of play from one form to the next, moving through the plantings, changing shape around the center palm and opening into a spiral at either end. Like the ponytail palm itself, its path is unpredictable, but it creates a steady visual rhythm that holds the entire composition together.
Grasses soften the harder materials and exaggerate the sense of movement. Lighting woven throughout the garden and inside the spirals brings the forms to life again after dark.
The result is playful without becoming a theme. Sculptural, a little quirky and completely at home.