Heart of the Garden

Hello, welcome to Heart of the Garden. I am Amy and I write about Gardens and tell stories about plants. In my spare time I think about plants, read about plants, buy plants, poke at plants, eat plants, and plant plants.

I have been gardening in Zones 6-7 in the midAtlantic northeast for 15+ years.

As my gardening philosophy has evolved, so have the reasons and the ways that I garden. It is so much more than cultivating beauty. It’s a way to unearth our connections to the very complex web of life in a process that can potentially bring so much joy for anyone willing to get a little messy.

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I started my formative years in a basement apartment in Park Slope Brooklyn, back in the 1900s before it was what it is today (before the farmers market came to town.) I launched into the world with a series of temp jobs at Sesame Street which was as full of the wholesome, wonderful people that you would expect. I was too distracted by all the many other things I wanted to learn about to commit to tv production. And paying what I thought was an abysmally steep rent (little did I know what was about to hit the market) seemed to eclipse any kind of wanting when it came to establishing a real career.

My dad was a landscape architect and I never realized how much of an education in hort I’d actually inherited from him until one day when I was walking down a Brooklyn street with a friend, passing brownstones and beautiful limestone stoops with small gardens and containers. I realized that the names of all the plants were playing in my head like a faint radio signal. I just began to say them out loud. My friend was surprised that I knew them all. I thought everybody knew what hostas and dusty miller and marigolds and sage were. (This was back at the dawning of the internet so the amount of information at our collective fingertips was pretty much limited to whatever was on those Encarta Encyclopedia CDROMs.) But it made me realize how internalized those names were and how familiar they were, like old friends. That was my first gardening spark moment.

I dabbled in publishing before moving on to assorted roles in higher ed, leap frogging between coasts during the dot com boom when I finally found a course of study that would allow me, in fact, encourage me to remain a generalist—a subject that brought me to Philadelphia, a city with a concentrated, rich resource of museums. I received a masters in Museum Education and worked for several years as a content creator for the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. The vast collections there, for the most part, piece together the stories that bring past cultural expressions to life. Skirting the edges of archaeological scholarship, I realized how much I loved to take an academic text and attempt to make it relatable and accessible for a general audience who might never have found this subject engaging. I poured over so much research searching for the spark that had the most potential to draw people in and animate the past. This was during the dawning of social media so it was a pretty lawless landscape, but it was great practice for everything I am constantly engaging in today with plants and their counterparts. And thankfully today, we have entire fields of study devoted to “Science Communication” which is full of so much creativity and innovation.

Once I moved from the city to the wilds of Chester County, PA many moons later I became truly obsessed with gardening. They say you don’t really know a plant until you’ve killed it, and I learned A LOT. I made so so many mistakes (like planting creeping jenny in the ground? What was I thinking?) And it wasn’t until we moved to a patch of land that had been stewarded by a Master Gardener/permaculture expert (compete with giant hugels in the middle of multiple towering cairns of who-knows-what that she’d dragged into the Garden for raised beds) that I really became a true full-fledged dirt witch. In addition to all the receipts for paw paw trees and rough drafts of compost-smudged, hand-scribbled garden plans, she also left me her Penn State Master Gardening manual and notebooks. I almost felt a little electric shock when she handed me that heap of books. I think she knew what she was passing along and it wasn’t just about this one small yard full of kale and comfrey. I don’t even remember how it happened, but I wafted right into the Master Gardener Program a few years later where I met some truly wonderful people and learned about so many facets of gardening that really sharpened my resolve to dig into this subject for real and for good.

Now, as a writer for Longwood Gardens, I have the privilege to indulge my love of gardening and really sit in this world in perpetual pursuit of sparks, little kernels of information that might ignite a revelation however instant or delayed it might be—always looking for ways to frame stories that connect our lived experiences to the natural world. And I never truly had to shake off the idea of being a generalist because, like art and archaeology and literature, gardening is culture and provides a faceted look at the ways we connect to all aspects of life. And for me, that is everything.