In this informative webinar, we’ll hear from garden designer and writer, Leslie Bennett, about her approach toward designing life-changing home landscapes. We’ll explore her belief that gardens can be places where we can experience awe-inspiring beauty, deepen our relationship with plants and each other, attune with nature and the seasons, and remember the stories we choose to tell about who we are and how we belong.
Leslie will share about her journey toward her career as a landscape designer and owner of Pine House Edible Gardens in Oakland, CA, expand on her philosophy of garden design and share about her Black Sanctuary Gardens project. Finally she will tell us about the inspiration for her new book Garden Wonderland, taking us on a photographic tour of some of the inspiring and beautiful garden spaces she and her team have created around the San Francisco Bay Area.
Leslie Bennett is the founder and owner of Pine House Edible Gardens, an Oakland-based landscape design/build firm that creates aesthetic edible gardens and productive outdoor spaces. She is co-author of Garden Wonderland (Ten Speed Press, 2024) and The Beautiful Edible Garden (Ten Speed Press, 2013). Leslie is included on the Elle Decor A-List for 2023 and the two years preceding, was named a Top 50 Black Trailblazer by Oprah in 2022, is a recipient of the American Horticultural Society’s Landscape Design Award, and is founder of Black Sanctuary Gardens.
welcome everyone we are so excited that you are joining us for today’s presentation I’m going to go ahead and just give it a moment for people to get connected and then we’ll officially begin all right welcome everyone to let’s talk African-American Gardens this series is a proud collaboration between Smithsonian Gardens and the national museum of africanamerican history and culture we are so excited to have Lesley Bennett joining us today my name is Katie mun I’m the education specialist at Smithsonian Gardens and before I pass it off to my co-collaborator who will introduce our presenter I just want to go over a few housekeeping items this presentation is being recorded and will be made available in our online let’s talk Gardens library after uh after we conclude uh the chat box is available for you to ask your questions we will have time at the end of Leslie’s presentation uh for you to ask questions and uh we can’t wait to hear of what you want to know and uh with that I’m going to go ahead and introduce my co-collaborator Carla Thomas mcginness the assistant director of council operations and Museum initiatives the national Museum of africanamerican History and culture hi Carla hello thank you Katie we are so excited that Leslie Bennett is with us here today as you know if you’ve tuned into to a let’s talk African-American Gardens before we are here in commemoration and celebration of the handbook of the Negro Garden Club of Virginia which was published in the early 1940s um but we are here today to talk about Leslie uh to talk about garden wonderlands and creating a life-changing outdoor spaces for beauty Harvest meeting and joy so let me introduce our illustrious speaker today Leslie Bennett is the founder and owner of pin housee edible Gardens an oakland-based landscape design build firm that creates aesthetic edible Gardens and productive outdoor spaces she is co-author of garden Wonderland and the uh beautiful Edible Garden both published by 10 speed spread 10 speed press Leslie is included on the L Decor a list for 2023 and the two years proceeding was named a top 50 black Trailblazer by Oprah Winfrey in 2022 she is a recipient of the American Horticultural society’s landscape design award and is founder of the black Sanctuary Gardens Leslie and her firm’s work have been featured in architectural digest El Decor Martha Stewart Living Better Homes and Gardens Sunset magazine New York Times Los Angeles Times gardenista and more Leslie hold holds degrees from Harvard University Columbia Law School and University College London in the fields of environmental justice land use law cultural property and preservation she lives in gardens in Oakland California with her two children so without further Ado let me turn it over to you Leslie thank you so much for being here hi um hi everybody thank you so much um Katie and Carla I really appreciate it and um thanks so much to the Smithsonian for inviting me this is a real honor and I’m really happy to be here so all right so we’re we’re gonna we’re gonna disappear for a minute and let you let you take it okay and I’m noticing that the screen is a little fuzzy so I don’t know what that is maybe we should try sharing from your screen um I don’t know um but yeah I see it maybe we’ll here let me click the next you want to test a few photos lese just to see if it’s oh maybe it’s just that first oh look there we go there it is all right Leslie all right um okay great well thank you and hi again everybody um webinar format sort of funny I’m talking to avoid myself um but I’ll just imagine you all out there smiling and nodding you can send me uh text messages or spaces the um chat messages as we as we go along and Katie and Carla will send them my way um but in any case it’s great to be here and um as Cara mentioned I’m the um founder and owner of Pine house edible Gardens um and the black Sanctuary Gardens project um and I’m based in Oakland California and I’ve been doing this work for about 15 years now um and just came out with a book um covering a lot of the work that my team and I do here in Oakland so I’m excited to share about that with you today um one of the real reasons or the big reason why I um wanted to come and do this talk today is that um I’m very really passionate about representation of um black people in well in the world generally um and I’m just really excited to show up and um uh represent myself as a black Landscape designer um in this field of garden design um I’m raising two kids in this country right now and um one of the things I feel really strongly about is just letting them know that they can be that we as black people exist in so many different shapes and forms and Fields we we hold multitudes can do anything and everything and in fact are doing so many amazing things um so um and we can do whatever we want to do so um so yeah I’m kind of here here to spread that message and share some of my journey um to hopefully Inspire um well everybody hopefully but especially any young people especially any young black people who are listening wondering what they can or should do with their lives um just to let them know that you can follow your imagination and create the world for yourself that you want to live in so um so with that I’ll um I wanted to share a little bit about my background and journey and I think part of the reason I feel so passionately about about representation and sharing sort of alternative Journeys because mine has been an alternative journey is that I didn’t entirely get that memo when I was when I was a young um person growing up I grew up in palalo California um daughter of immigrants my father’s from Jamaica and my mom’s from England um and as a mixed race black women growing our at the time growing up in a white dominant Society with immigrant parents who wanted the best for me um I didn’t really I didn’t know I could be a garden designer it just really was not an option you know I was um very strongly um maybe subtly but strongly pushed toward um a professional career as a lawyer or doctor or something like that and um and in fact that’s that is what I did I um I studied I went to Harvard for undergrad and I studied um law at Columbia and University College London and um you know I was really I was 27 years old before I realized that I really wanted to I could do something else I really wanted to be out in the garden I wanted to have my hands in the soil I wanted to be in touch with plants and um so anyways I put myself here today to really try to maybe help some folks get there a little bit faster and let you know that it is possible I still have a job and still still be okay um and and choose Gardens to be the center of your life um and a little bit more on my my background is um you know I I what I think is sort of funny is how long it did take me to get there but I I was always interested in gardens and plants and truly people’s relationships to with the land and with plants and with Gardens um I’m so thankful to my mom for being a gardener instead of even though I expressed zero interest in it as a child um I have very clear memories of her being in the backyard ping around just being in in an outdoor space with plants and I would always be doing something else I certainly never gardened um but it was modeled for me and so I appreciate that and I think that’s a really powerful um sort of nugget to hold on to especially for those of us who are raising kids like just showing that um that it is that we can be in relationship with plants and I think that’s one of the powerful things about a garden just making the place you know it’s uh if you build it they will come so make the garden be out there and then see what happens and I think um I think laying the path for that kind of connection is so important um but anyway so um so I grew up um not comfortable with Gardens but not very interested really a passionate um environmentalist I uh I remember I found it the uh Earth Club in my high school I really wanted to save the planet still want to save the planet um went off to college and decided to study environmental science and public policy um with a focus on environmental justice um which is really around how racism um systemic racism affects our experience in the world in the landscape um a really classic example of sort of how bus depot stations are often situated and black and brown lower inome communities um and that sort of looks like an Environ a policy or a policy or transport decision but it actually really impacts um the landscape that black and brown people live with um they the health effects that they’re um the health impacts that they’re exposed to and um is an example of how landscape um an an example of environmental justice so so I studed studied those kinds of things and I I really I love the intersection again of like of humanity and um policy landscape I decided to um go deeper into that and I went to law school um and decided to focus on um land use law um and then ended up getting a master’s in law in uh cultural property and Landscape preservation um and was really I loved I love that line of study because it was really around again like how do the choices that we make as that feel like just regular policy like what’s going to happen in this public park are we going to sell hot dogs or are we going to have just nature or we gonna have put it in a baseball field um and how those choices um inform how people relate to the land that they live with um so I was doing all this and I gosh I did landed I went to London I worked for the foreign agricultural service um wrote papers about the European landscape and how again uh policy choices really affect the landscape and and how people feel about the land and as I was this was a big turning point for me because I was there um in my little office in London and at this point I was officially a policy wonk um and I remember I was on the phone with some farmer in Dorset or something somewhere in you know in the countryside of England um interviewing her for some paper I was writing and at some point during the phone call she interrupted me and she said um she said have you ever been to a farm in other words like do you know what the heck you’re talking about and I uh I laughed and I was like actually no I’ve never been I’m 20 26 or seven years old and I’m here writing papers from the office in London and I literally have never done anything remotely practical um let alone uh sticking my my hands into the dirt so um she invited me out to her farm and um and I went and I from there I was like oh I really like this and I started volunteering at farms on the weekend um through a program called wolf willing workers on Organic Farms um I think is is what it stands for but basically you can go spend weekends at um at homesteads and farms around England so I started I started to do that and realized that I loved it so I’d be working at my Law Firm um I end up having a job at a law firm briefly in London and then on weekends I’d go out to these homesteads and harvest asparagus and rhubarb and all these cute little English things strawberries and um and I loved it I truly loved it I ended up leaving my job I um did a permaculture course again out in the countryside in England and um it was a apple orchard and mushroom farm and I it was a a twoe course right it was the first time I went and lived on a farm for the first and and immersed myself in it and in that moment I I was on the farm and I think it was day two or three and I just had a moment where I looked up and looked around and I said wow I’m really happy I really really like this um and that was that was a really big turning point for me um and I realized that I wanted to um do more that this would sort of be I honestly none of this even existed for me because it it was just uh my parents did not raise me to be a gardener or a garden designer um so this this option literally did not exist for me before I sort of found it and at that point I still didn’t know what it would look like and in many ways I think you know even today I 15 years later I still don’t really know what it looks like and I think that’s part of being a business owner you’re it’s a creative Enterprise in the sense that you’re you’re always generating what the next step is and what you’re going to do um but that sort of became my North star of okay I love this I feel really good being connected with the land with the plants with nature and I’m just going to keep following that Clarity and with the knowledge that there are so many other people just like me who are stuck in a corporate job stuck in whatever an uncor job stuck somewhere feeling disconnected I think so many of us feel disconnected in our modern sometimes Urban lives um and the land and and Gardens and plants are there to kind of um to ground us and um and so any I decided I would start a business and share this message with the world and let people know that they could um not necessarily do exactly what I’ve done but um but take take the parts of it that work for them and that really is the premise of my business um Pine house edible Gardens but I forgot so I’ve got pictures here um so I wanted to share a little bit so so I was on the farm in England loved it um decided I was going to go deeper and um really for the next three years pursued that really deeply and um uh to the concern dismay of my family perhaps um I decided to I moved to Jamaica where my father is from um and I decided I wanted to go work on a farm um so that’s the image I’ve got here I don’t know if it’s cut off hopefully it isn’t um anyways I moved to the rural Parish of um St Elizabeth Jamaica and I’m sharing this part of these images have a couple more um because so much of my love and care for gardening is really rooted in this time that I spent in Jamaica and it’s so rooted in my own ancestry and sort of in this real homecoming that happened for me when I moved to Jamaica um but anyways I Googled I found a found there were not very many organic farms in Jamaica at the time I think there were three or four I found one it was in the rural Parish of St Elizabeth which is the Bread Basket of Jamaica where um there’s so many farmers and um I moved to a tiny little um Cottage on the beach and I found the local farmer who was farming at this organic farm up in um the hills of Malin uh near Monroe College and I asked if I could volunteer and um I went up to the farm and you can see here this is the Red Dirt of Jamaica which is um really famous and important um or a source of Pride I would say for Jamaicans um is really really rich fertile soil that um the red coloring comes from the box site which is um Jamaica is one of the only places that has um Rich resources of boxy which is the one of the ingredients for aluminum um but so aside from being a great aluminum maker it is also a great food maker um so you can see there’s growing on the left there this is me in the fields um I think I must have been 20 I was 28 or 29 this is this is the farm um that um the guy there in the yellow shirt um became my husband not my ex-husband but we were together for 13 years and he was a part of um part of my business and and life story as well so we’ll come to that um that guy on the left there was a local farmer killer green I’m pretty sure was his name that just came to me um I may be taking too long but this is a a really favorite message of mine so um so let’s see uh so killer green was the the lead farmer he taught us so and some of the nobody else on the farm had actually grown organically so we um he taught us all a lot about what to do and there’s me um these are not cute pictures of me but they’re what I have um so there’s me harvesting basil we were growing there’s me harvesting those look like little yellow pear Tomatoes we are weighing them and transporting them to um we were growing these organic greens for uh hotels on the island so we’d grow them uh Harvest them and transport them to like the the Ritz hotel on the North Coast um so it was a great little micro business for for this local farmer um anyways I learned a lot um I really adored that time there and you know it with don’t have my tools shown here but I was there farming with a machete we we tilled the soil with machetes or you know dug it up loosened it planted harvested did everything with machetes and I I was there for almost a year and loved it so um after that I decided to go deeper I moved back home to California I moved up to deepest darkest mesino uh to a little town called kovo this was you know what I was doing here I was building my bed um I slept in the barn um um and that was funny my mom dropped me off she was like wow um but I moved to a trailer in the woods sorry I haven’t seen these photos in a long time but they’re fun uh I moved to a trailer in the woods in Grass Valley this was my home also um the farm was literally right next door and um yeah for for three years I followed my followed my intuition my spirit and um it took me to the woods it took me to a train in the woods um I loved it so much and I learned so much um I decided at at a certain point that I wanted to go go to Oakland and bring the skills that I sort of following that Vision that I had when I was in England on that apple orchard um I wanted to I knew that I was learning something that was really valuable and was changing my life and I wanted to bring it to Oakland to I wanted to be working um with and around people who look like me and um and also who had experiences like me had maybe were maybe living in a in what we’ll just call the modern world um you know trying to trying to make it all work going to school going to your job raising your family um living the lives that we lead um which are largely disconnected from the land and I really so this was one of my very first projects um which was a um friend and Community uh member um her little backyard in Oakland and she wanted to grow some food so there’s me digging with a shovel it was fun um and I did this with a mentor who I work Patrick who I worked with up in Grass Valley he C he came down and helped me and also a friend from college um so anyway those are the old days that was fun thanks for the walk down memory lane um so so let’s see um eventually I started my so that that first shot was like the very first iteration of my business um which over the last 15 years has morphed into Pine house edible Gardens um which um is a lot more streamlined and and fancy looking now um but is really the Same Spirit of um the the the reason and the reason why I’m so passionate about my work is that I’m driven to um help homeowners um live uh have a relationship with the land that they live with and so so much of my work is about relationships and um we we design and install Gardens and we also help to maintain them but it’s really very much of a collaborative coaching um almost interpretive service where we’re like Hey we’re in your Gardens this week this is what’s happening because these are not they’re not static Landscapes that we’re making we’re creating these really beautiful edible integrated Landscapes that have that are may look like a traditional garden and have lots of ornamental beautiful plantings in them but there’s also food plants there’s medicine plants plants there’s culturally meaningful plants all integrated throughout and um and a lot of times these are plants that people are not familiar with you know they’re like oh I really love um you know cherries or I really rhubarb my mom used to always make something with rhubarb and I want to grow that plant but they don’t know what it looks like and so we are um teaching them about how to how to take care of it how to grow it how to harvest it how to cook with it um and really how to how to be in relationship with it and so I love that so this is our um our current website our services let me see if there’s anything else I wanted to talk about um let’s see um yeah so anyway so Pine house um I think as I was working on these Farms up in Grass Valley and mesino I I loved growing about food that felt like wow this is this is amazing and still to this day I’m amazed I the very simple but profound Revelation that like I can grow food I can feed myself and I can actually do it on a very small plot of land you know you don’t actually need I think we all grow up with this idea or in America at least we grew up with this idea of like you got to be a farmer with like couple hundred acres and trade soybeans or something but it’s not that you can actually Homestead and grow um all the food you need to eat you know if you get really really into it and do it intensively on a in a small backyard um I don’t feel that we are are all intended to be Farmers or need to be Farmers I don’t aim for self-sufficiency I actually feel that um sort of the experience and the relationship is the really important thing so that’s what I encourage um our clients and people to do um but anyway so um as I was working on these Farms learning about how to grow food um I loved it and I had this moment where I was like this um something there’s something about the organic farming world that I experienced that was very um sort of counterculture very um anti-mainstream and for some reason also reject very utilitarian oriented and sort of rejecting of beauty as though Beauty um were this thing that’s oops let me delete that here um as though Beauty were only sort of the domain of the rich or if it’s frivolous or something that we shouldn’t all oops yeah shouldn’t [Music] all sorry I’m trying to share the screen so it look a little better anyways um yeah uh this idea that that beauty is not for all of us for some reason you know and I exper I worked supported with some local um like community service things too and so many of the gardens that were being made for um for lower income folks were also just very utilitarian and um they’re like well we should grow some food and make this really practical and help everybody but um you know I realized I have this very strong belief that we all deserve access to beauty and um and if we’re going to make a garden let’s make it food producing let’s make it beautiful um and then over time as I started working and designing these Gardens I um I sort of started to tease out this idea of um making Gardens meaningful and realizing that we’re all these Gardens are these sort of sites that we’re creating where we get to feed ourselves um our bodies Our Spirits our our minds um and the the food that we all need is unique because of our the stories and the the histories that we’re all coming from and so it started to become really clear to me that I wanted to be incorporating people’s histories their lineage their their backgrounds into the gardens that we are making so you know our consult questions sort of morphed from being like well what do you want to grow and eat and like what flowers do you like and what look do you like which are all very important questions and also trying to go a little deeper and say okay what matters to you like what practices are you trying to grow for yourself and your family um do you have memories of something that was really meaningful for you as a child um that you’d like to bring into your current life or pass along to your children and those are things you know that can be like well my you know my grandmother loved daffodils and she always had them and she got so excited and I I knew it was spring like that sort of um sort of fleeting memory that’s there um or um something like there was an apple tree on my backyard and my grandfather would pick the apples and we’d all make apple pie and that was just a happy memory um I think a lot of us even those of us who are living pretty removed from the land have something somewhere you know for me my grandmother used to visit from Jamaica and she would um whenever my brother and I were sick she would make fever grass tea for us um and it was it’s such a unique it’s which is also lemongrass it’s such a unique flavor and I really associate it strongly with her um so in my with my own garden I knew I wanted to grow lemongrass fever grass and I I hadn’t really done anything with it since I was eight or nine years old um but I wanted to get to know that plant I wanted to grow it I wanted to taste it again and I also wanted to go grow it for my kids and give it to them when they were sick because I remember that real sense of caring that sort of came along with that and uh wanted to pass that along okay so I’m uh jumping around a little but um I think that I’ll scre good in the next screen so um so this is our services now we our garden design the middle picture is Harvest and then we do lots of flower arranging and I I guess the belief that I want to or you can see the um the premise here is that I I truly believe that um creating a backyard garden that supports you um allows you to be show up better in the world support your friends family and community and um sort of garden by Garden um person by person change our world for the better so that is the sort of premise that we that we work with um the our business has grown um and now you’ve got all these different Gardens all over the Bay Area I’ll be showing a few of them later um over time in 2019 um I decided to found the black Sanctuary Gardens project and that really came out of oh wow I’m really running short on time okay that really came out of I was I think I was just wrestling with the with the my passion has always been around um social justice racial Justice um really grappling with what it is to be be a black person in this country with all the complexities and then um doing what is largely high-end Landscaping highend residential Landscaping in the Bay Area and how to sort of bring those two together um I landed on this project the black Sanctuary Gardens project which um basically is is now is fully incorporated into my business and it is a series of gardens um created uh in collaboration with black women here in the Oakland area and part of it is access oriented um because I think in my work I been really traversing the American landscape and really seeing the results of um government policies over the last 200 years here and um witnessing the land and the that people are living with and the resources that people have um due to our history um so there are access issues that I wanted to address um and so the way that that is handled is that um everybody who works any any standard client of pine house um a percentage of the fees that they pay for design build and maintenance um are directed toward the black Sanctuary Gardens project and that many um supports the cost um for design build and care of um Gardens for black women in the in the Oakland area um and so in that way we’re able to meet black women where they are and so some black women have you know low to no cost Gardens provided some are self-funding um and uh it makes sense that there’s a range um the bigger part of the black Sanctuary Gardens project um is truly this it’s almost an art project of um I guess like an it’s an afro futurist art project of what does the future look like and where um are black people in it and um in my vision we are in our Gardens and the truth is you know we’re in our Gardens now um media just doesn’t show us there we’ve been in our Gardens for ages because we are um as as all people on this planet are I believe we’re all we are all people of the land and we’re all descended from people who had deep relationships with um nature and plants and land and um we’re all in different level most of us are in different levels of removal from that um but I I love going back to the idea of black women in relationship with the land um in touch with our Birthright um to be connected with the land and so a big part of the project is creating these Gardens um obviously the women getting to live and be with them and I am a member I’m a participant also in the project so I um I live in relationship with my backyard and I love it and then there’s also a portrait series which is what I think one of the things that the world needs most is just beautiful images of us in our Gardens um and so I thought I’d share a couple pictures and I’m going to keep scrolling along here here because I’m way behind time but thank you for listening um so this is actually our very first black Sanctuary Garden um created back in 2019 in uh East Oakland and this is AA who is a um friend and Community leader and this is um her and her backyard and I um just loved MAA for saying yes to me when I suggested this idea and being up for it I feel like as with the people who are involved with the book or the homeowners and clients who were included in the book it’s a very intimate thing to um to allow your to have people take photos of you in your garden in these spaces that we create which are very intimate this is not like a standard backyard with a grass and some aelas this is a backyard filled with really meaningful things um amaka’s favorite flowers the roses are just to her left and um Plum which is her um Partners uh relates to her partner’s Japanese Heritage um this is my backyard also in East Oakland um and you’ll see a lot more of this in the book but you can see there’s place for me and my kids to Lounge a dining table there’s veggie beds on the left um sort of graphic bold forms there’s me living my best life and um I for E this is actually the first time I’ve assembled all the the portraits and so far we’ve created eight Gardens black Sanctuary Gardens um all in Oakland and um we’ve taken portrait for not all of them yet but I’ve got like five or six of them and the portraits and so it’s exciting for me to see them sort of assembled here but um but I love the idea of creating the landscape taking a picture of the garden and then taking a picture of each woman sort of in whatever sort of it’s sort of a modern an updated intersectional black woman centered um room of her own um uh a garden of our own so anyway there’s me on the couch living my best life um this is Courtney’s Garden um and Courtney is another um she lives in East Oakland she’s an herbalist this Garden is full of so many amazing um medicinal plants yo Sage this amazing tobacco plant this is um some images of her with the Yo which is one of the most healing plants on the planet that um it grows on all seven continents um every culture around the world has a Rel ship a historical relationship with yo and its healing properties and um Courtney has a strong relationship with it as well um she does this amazing ritual that she’s come up with herself um working with a tobacco plant um that a shaman shared with her and she um she is talking to her plant she’s whispering to them she’s playing music she’s blowing smoke on them and I just adore everything that she taught me and um that she she incl this is a photo from the book that she’s sharing with the world um this is another Garden this is mica’s Garden this is um really an in generational Family Garden Guyana um mica’s family is guyan so there’s a good number of guyan um plants growing in here there’s Malica and her portrait which is just so joyful and part of what I’m so excited about with the black Sanctuary Garden Project again as I say are these portraits um I personally do not see enough portraits of black women uh in gardens being our fully expressed self-actualized selves and so that was what I what I’ve been so curious and excited about making and it’s such a joy to get to see us and you can see each of these portraits and each of these Gardens are very different um but um I’m so happy to be able to to have been able to create these images um and I should mention Rachel W who’s the photographer for this project and for the book um and Julie chai who’s my co-author and also collaborator on the black Sanctuary Gardens project but bringing these um images to the world is one of the things I’m happiest about this is Katie this is um Katie is a um another Oakland resident um this is a rental property and an apartment building it’s a little deck space um so playful so cute I included this one too because it’s cute but also you can see a little bit more of the space like we can have Gardens um whether we’ve got a backyard or just a little deck balcony Katie chose all these shell um containers that are so beautiful and so unique and just so her um so I love that um there’s some more cute little images just and so for each project you know we talk about what’s meaningful to you um this is um freda’s Garden this is Freda Newton um Widow of huie Newton um Co co-founder of the Black Panther Party um uh such an honor to get to work with her and this is her gorgeous garden and back in West Oakland and you know just for example you know she she grew up with her mother um being a a rose lover um and a she had a Rose Garden that she tended and her father um was really into growing vegetables and I think had an agricultural degree um and so when fredrica was thinking about what she wanted to have in her garden she really wanted to she wanted a place that was peaceful where she could go and sort of feel some restoration and serenity um after her complex workday um she really wanted to support black artists local emerging black artists you can see there’s a in the lower right there’s a blue bird bath which is made by a local black artist um there’s like 20 pieces of amazing art in this Garden um all made by local black emerging artists um and these more pictures in the book but it’s an incredible space that um speaks to fr his passions and also her family history and also just her hopes and dreams for herself she wanted to you know be the person who could go out and pick some fresh herbs and make a healthy meal that was that’s part of the culture she was growing for herself um and there’s fredrica radiant and amazing um sitting um you can’t see the garden here but viewing her garden and um at peace and one with the world in her garden um so that leads me to oh and I should mention uh black Sanctuary Gardens you can follow along on Instagram that’s the primary place for um finding information it’s um BLK Sanctuary Gardens um so please follow along um we do at least one project a year and sometimes more and um do sort of seasonal postings updating and it’s it’s just a really fun and beautiful project to follow along um so that gets us to Garden Wonderland which my new book um five of the eight black Sanctuary garden projects are included in the book um and then there’s 19 out of a total of 19 um client Gardens um that are all Gardens that my team Holly cian Lana Lopez Jorge Ramirez and more um Jessica cumerford um all created and um help me care for here in the San Francisco Bay Area um and so the title there create life-changing outdoor spaces from beauty Harvest meaning and joy um hopefully that sums it up but I I really believe that the purpose or the the main pass part point of the book is that I really believe that our backyards can be so much more than we have been led to believe um they can be these real sites for transformation and it it does take with a little bit of design intent and care we can um incorporate um the things that that make the space transformational and for me um I’ve sort of I sat and thought about you I’ve been doing this now for 15 years creating what are pretty amazing Gardens and um figured out like what is it that’s making these working and and really more than that because we take care of the gardens I’ve been I’ve seen how the gardens really impact my clients lives and how they’re interacting with them and and they tell me and so I’ve been able to sort of watch and learn and discern okay what works what is happening here why are these Gardens so impactful and um and so the principles that I’ve sort of boiled it down to and this is all included in the book or this is actually like a big part of the book um is uh let’s see so I will lose track of them but so the first one is around what’s my next slide okay we’ll leave it on this because that’s nice I’ll tell you so I included a few pictures of our Gardens but um this is a great one the um the first principle in the book is around experience with plants and designing a space where you’re truly in Daily regular uh interaction relationship with plants I I believe that plants are our allies but you and that is to say they can help us um they can make our lives so much better um but you can’t really be an ally with someone that you are not in touch with right so you got to make a garden where you plant these things and then make it interactive make put the seat put the chair underneath the tree um make a path where you’re walking by and there’s blueberries that you get to pick or a um fragrant cented duranium or Lilac that you get to encounter um or include native um or non-native pollinator tractors and see wildlife come to your garden this is a great example of a little Garden in a front yard in Los Altos which is low water full of California natives full of Edibles there’s Rosemary there’s pineapple guava there’s loquat um this is another shot of freda’s garden um I’m really running short on time now so I’m just going to say um the four principles are experience um with plants Beauty connection which is around um growing food and I just I’ll it is to me the the power and potential of food to shape Our Lives growing food to shape Our Lives when you grow food it becomes really clear and this goes back to a little Environmental L lesle of you know how can I get people to care about this planet and I feel like when you eat food that’s been grown in the soil you realize the plants eat the soil you eat the plants and we are really that directly connected to the land that we are living with and that that very soil so we’ve got to take care of the soil and um so I think that lesson is sort of unavoidable and essential um and and what’s so great about growing food is that you end up having food you end up with an abundance to share and that means you can and to be creative with so you can um sort of experience abundance which I think is a a big mindset shift as well um learning okay I have this zucchini bumper crop what am I going to do with it and I think that’s that’s a moment of creative inspiration um that I welcome um and same with flowers you know having some flowers in your garden that you can cut and share um it’s always the perfect gift for anybody for any occasion and just just that like always having the right thing to show up with is such a huge um thing so anyway uh this was a quick uh and the last element is around belonging um belonging in the sense of um I think all of us are searching for belonging and I think our Gardens can help us with that um for me in my own garden uh it’s been a lot about retracing my family lineage on both the English and Jamaican sides um but for all our clients it’s the story is different like what are the stories they want to hold to who are they where did they come from how are they connected how have they been connected over time to people places land um and what do they want to carry forward um so I think in many ways it can be connecting to our old or existing culture and then in many ways it’s a generative creative act of what is the culture I want to create for myself how do I want to be in the world what’s um and how can I create a space that supports and reflects and kind of literally generates that um and including plants again as allies um on that Journey okay so now I’m just going to flip through these so this is fredrika’s uh some more of her art these are some gorgeous sweet peas and this is just that sense of wonder that’s an experience you walk through that Arch and it’s just like wow the world’s amazing this is a beautiful veggie garden that we built up in Ross and again so much food so much abundance um flowers and food um a cute little uh Farm style Garden um for a family in Berkeley that was really missing their country life and wanting their kid to experience um I think the joys of the farm sort of in the city um your style can be modern it can be farmy it can be English cottagey it can be something entirely different that is your own um this is opuntia is that flat paddle it’s a fru and Cactus and UGI Chile and guava along with Citrus and other ornamentals beautiful front yard that some um homeowners in Mountain View creat for neighborhood Gatherings there’s tons of fruit trees and avocados and whatnot in that front yard a tiny little veggie bed with flowers in Oakland pineapple guava lavender this is a healing Garden featured in the book um a another food Garden um I’m a big fan of food and flowers like can’t have too many uh and these are the last few images this is me in my garden um not my black Sanctuary Gardens portrait um but similar I love to read um this is my happy spot I love sitting um for me happiness and peace is sitting on a comfortable chair surrounded by plants um blooms fragrance a good book I think I have a glass of wine there um and I am able to feel restored I’m able to feel grounded I’m able to feel connected and um come back out of my garden being kinder to myself kinder to my kids kinder to the people around me and um hopefully contributing to a better world um I pick flowers I love it they’re so pretty um and truly not because I’m such a great flower designer but because Nature’s beautiful and it’s so fun to get to co-create with it um there’s me and my kids growing up look at them growing up in relationship with nature we’re taste testing our plums our plots from the backyard tree and they love that um we’re growing Zeta loves watermelons we’re growing watermelon this year Samuel loves his passion fruit I just cut it back and he’s mad but he’s so excited that it’s going to grow back um he also is super into hosting swallow taals and monarchs on milkweed and um fennel in our backyard and these are the memories that I they’re having this childhood in this experience because I I designed it and in collaboration with Holly cin um but I designed it in my mind um for them um I wanted them to have this um this experience I wanted them to to to have these memories I wanted this to be their their foundation so um so anyway I love this picture and it it really represents so much of what I want to see in the world for them and for everybody um this is Samuel picking his green beans that’s a beautiful food Harvest um you can do this to folks um this is little Zeta planting some Jamaican sorl which I’ll close with um that’s this is a plant that I grew up drinking Jamaican sorl is the holiday drink for Jamaicans and Caribbeans and I think a lot of folks around the world um it grows in the subtropical um climates but you can also grow it here in California or anywhere Across America as a annual summer crop um but anyways I grew up drinking this I loved it it’s sweet it’s nutmeggy it’s amazing it’s got rum in it when you get older it’s fun um but that’s the Christmas drink in Jamaica and um I didn’t even know it was a plant it was just like this delicious drink and then when I was farming in Jamaica I drove past some field and I was like wait what’s that and somebody’s like that’s sorl and I stopped and looked and I was so excited to see it but I still didn’t know it and then you know finally when I built my own garden I said I really want to get to know this plant I want to grow it and so I located a source I um grew it um harvested it and um I don’t have pictures of this here but harvested it with Zeta and um we brewed it and made our own homegrown soril and for me that was just such a practice of grounding into my own history and learning more about where I’m from learning more about how the people I come from on both sides of my family and again this is true for all of us we all come from came from people who had such deep relationships and resourcefulness and ability to make delicious things healing things wonderful things um from the land and plants and in relationship with all these things and I um I personally had lost track of that and I’ve been able to come back into relationship with it and it um add so much Beauty to My Life um so much Wonder To My Life um and I want that for for all of you for anybody anybody who’s interested that is so um that is the close of my talk it is 9:52 so we have eight minutes and and um I if anybody would like to send in questions or maybe have Carl pass yeah there yeah we’ve got some great questions in the chat um we had an early question from Babette um two questions what type of raised bed garden soil blend do you use and what is your favorite companion plant um rais BS I generally what we do is we put drain rock at the bottom of the beds um so the most important thing is really how much soil you’ve got you want to have at least 18 Ines ideally 2 feet of soil for your plant roots to grow in um I usually go to the bulk supply supply place and buy their organic veggie blend um that can be a little sometimes it’s not quite right so sometimes we add quar um like a coconut quar some we add compost um organic compost um think those are the few thing the most of the things we add um but go to your local um Supply Center and they can advise you you really just want to make sure it’s organic I think the whole point of growing food is that you know what’s in it you know again that same thing the soil to plant to human so know what’s in the soil because that’s literally what you’re eating and um and just keep adding compost every season every year and you’ll be good do you oh and and companion plant you know I don’t do companion plants I don’t think it has to be that complicated just plant the stuff have fun you’re gonna do great and do you do crop rotation in the I do to a certain extent and I I was really into it when I started because i’ had been on farms and you know that’s what you’re taught to do um so I’d move my tomatoes around each year and I’d plant favas and and we do do that when we can when we have the space but most of us don’t have that much space where you can really rotate and I’ve realized that it’s actually not that necessary if you add compost and organic fertilizer each year um the key is you just want to you don’t want to deplete your soil so that um if your sto if your soil is very rich and nutrient um Laden then your plants will be healthy and if your plants are healthy and resilient then you have no they’ll sort of naturally fight off um diseases and and pests and then you won’t even be tempted to not be organic um I almost forget to talk about being organic because it’s so um it feels uh just there like everything I do is organic everything we do at Pine house is organic um but grow organic folks don’t use those chemicals um and your compost and soil health is key to that Leslie we had a question in the chat during your presentation from a participant who’s updating an outdoor space and they want to incorporate a garden for three young children do you have any recommendations for easy to grow lower maintenance food plants that you might recommend them starting out with yeah yeah I mean I think um I would always have a small um annual planting area for them and that can be just like a little wine tub or a felt bucket or even just like a five gallon bucket like whatever your whatever you want there ideally make it something beautiful you want to look at but um it can be a small planting area where they can just plant whatever they want like stick the seeds in that they bring home from school like grow potatoes like just plant a tomato um so that for sure and then what I did with my own kids and I’ve loved doing it is I just ask them what is their favorite thing and they each get a plant um and so Samuel at the time his favorite thing was apple trees were were Apple so I planted a small cumar apple for him in our backyard and a calar Apple is like the best creation ever it’s a dwarf vertical tree that’s just like three feet wide and it grows in a column it’s weird and wonderful um highly productive and so um that’s Samuel’s apple tree and he’s so proud and excited whenever he gets a crop and um Zita um she got a blueberry bush that was her favorite food and so I think it’s they each have like their own plant in the garden that um that has just made them be in relationship with it that much more easily and more closely there’s another question here um from someone who lives in Maryland um who asks what do you think about adding banana pills in water or oranges or aloe vera in water for for plants great I mean it’s all organic matter and it all um adds you know all these food and kitchen items they all break down in into nutrients that are accessible um to the plants that you um that you’re growing um I personally don’t do any of those things I feel like there’s so much information out there all these thing it makes it so complicated I feel my if I have any message it’s like growing food’s not that complicated you literally can stick you know as long as you’ve got your soil and if you’re in California or somewhere where it’s dry and irrigation system goes a long way um but I again I just feel like sometimes it’s over complicated and and it actually keeps people away from growing food you can totally do that you can do eggshells coffee like any of they’re fine but like you don’t have to just stick the seed in sing it a song visit it every day and um it will most likely grow and um reward you great well I know we are getting close to time and so I apologize that we won’t have time for all the questions in the chat but thank you all so much for participating to wrap up uh I believe Carla has one last question for Leslie today I do I have one question that comes from our handbook um the fourth chapter in the handbook is is called books you should read so I want to ask you what books should we read oh my goodness well um I am a at tired single mom of two young kids so um my reading is so limited these days I am reading some great fiction but that is irrelevant perhaps to this conversation uh the book I really have to recommend is my own book um look at this Garden Wonderland I see it’s flipped around on the screen um thank you that’s better Carla but Garden Wonderland it just came out on April 2nd um there’s my own backyard is on the cover the first half of the book is um all sort of how to it’s a really practical how to guide to like how to actually approach your own space and it’s very I really designed it for keeping in mind like or sorry I really um wrote it along with Julie Chim co-author thinking about just a regular person looking at their backyard trying to be like what on Earth should I do with this because it can be really overwhelming um and then the second half is um the 19 uh very inspiring Garden stories um with homeowners and their their um very unique Gardens so anyway I truly I’m thrilled with this book um one of the things I think is so exciting about it is that it is truly diverse and that was something that was very intentional and I wanted to I felt like the world needs that we need more images of more of us in our Gardens our beautiful lives at peace and in connection with the Earth and um I feel like we achieved that and when I flip through it I’m I it even startles me I’m like whoa I haven’t seen enough of this in my life this is insane um so I’m really just happy with it and I hope um I hope you all see a bit of yourselves in it when you read it and that you take um a little nugget of it um to your own backyards and make your own garden Wonderland thank you so much thank you so much thank you that was really fun thanks for letting me show pictures I don’t always get to do that um I um those those Jamaican farming ones are a treat a nice throwback Thursday yes totally thank you Carla thank you Katie yeah thank you for sharing your journey with us and for such a beautiful and informative talk uh thank you to our audience for joining us today you were getting a lot lot of shout outs in the chat so I’ll make sure to pass those along and thank you this has been H just another full wonderful entry in the Ser in the series we’ll see you next time see thanks everybody thank you so much for attending bye