It began with a garden. And a name spoken from memory.

I grew up in Wilson County, Tennessee. Dogs underfoot, dirt under my fingernails. But I also grew up around my mother and grandmothers, women who knew what a beautiful home looked like inside and out.

I have a master’s degree in fine art. Before I ever touched a garden, I spent years building things: large-scale light installations, immersive sculptures, environments designed to change how people feel inside them.

A garden is the most alive medium I’ve ever worked in. A painting holds still. A sculpture does what you tell it. A garden has weather and root systems and deer and drought and opinions of its own, and it still has to be beautiful.

The name didn’t come from a branding exercise or a marketing decision. My first client was Gerry, who had cultivated gardens for decades. After illness and strokes took much of his memory, he greeted me the same way every time: the grass girl. A beloved client who did not always remember my name, but knew exactly who I was.