Kate believes a garden comes alive fully when it unites its human denizens with the pleasures of both art and naturalism.

Her immigrant grandfather developed a fascination for plants through a long collaboration with his college roommate, who studied landscape architecture in the 1920s.

This led to her father’s family home being planted with then-rare species like Franklinia alatamaha, a tree native to the southern United States which went extinct in the wild (but not in cultivation) in the 1700s. The family still has the folder of plant nursery receipts and a design plan of the original garden.

She spent summers playing barefoot in the neighborhood creek, climbing trees, and visiting the Appalachian mountains with her family where a plant palette thrives that she still borrows from today in some native plant-community designs.

For the past three years she has been working on an urban naturalist certification, studying a local meadow’s population of native plants, insects, birds, and mammals and their relationships.

She encourages her clients to look closely at the garden with a magnifying glass and binoculars to see even more beauty in both the details of nature and in the relationships between the species which generates a humming, sweet-air, fascinating experience beyond what first meets the eye.