Gardening adventures with my assistant, Humphrey the English doodle.

We’re attempting the impossible: an English cottage garden in the Arizona desert.
Right now we have containers, optimism, and a lot to learn.

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This website is my ongoing attempt to make sense of a desert that refuses to be gentle — and to find pockets of softness anyway. It’s a place where I notice things, where I try to coax beauty out of heat and gravel, where humor and bewilderment sit right beside the quiet, stubborn hope that a garden can grow here.

It’s part gardening chronicle, part personal essay, part record of what it feels like to build a life in Phoenix when your instincts lean English and your landscape leans extreme. If you’re looking for resilience, small stories, and the slow-making of a world, you’re in the right place.

And if you want to wander a little deeper, my blog is where all of this unfolds in real time — the experiments, the failures, the small triumphs, the plants that surprise me, and the ones that absolutely do not. It’s a space for anyone who loves gardens, or stories, or the strange pleasure of trying to create softness in a place determined to be hard.