Hello Reader,

There are four tiny pots of verbena bonariensis under my grow lights right now that look like almost nothing. Just tiny leaves reaching above the soil. No indication whatsoever of what they will become.

But I can already see them — three feet tall, swaying in the breeze, covered in butterflies, doing exactly what verbena bonariensis does in late summer when it becomes something close to a miracle. The garden doesn't exist yet. But I can see it perfectly in my mind.

This is the time of year when the garden lives entirely in the imagination. The beds at Rabbit Run are waiting. The plans are made for an expanded pollinator garden and three experimental beds to test the color schemes I have been thinking about all winter (thank you Mr. Claus Dalby).

It's all intention and grow lights and tiny leaves reaching upwards. This is how every extraordinary garden begins. With a vision that arrives before the soil is ready.

The Transformational Power of Beautiful Gardens

Today, we know Claus Dalby as one of the most admired gardeners in Scandinavia. His books are beautiful. His garden in Denmark is extraordinary. But the thing about Claus Dalby that stopped me in my tracks was learning that he never intended to make his garden. Not until the afternoon he walked through a gate in the North Jutland dunes and into the garden of a painter named Anne Just.

He arrived as a publisher. He was there to sign a book deal. He left with a contract — and with something else entirely. A vision he didn’t have when he arrived. Seeds were sown that afternoon that Claus Dalby is probably still tending.

​Anne Just was a painter. As a girl she cycled through the Danish countryside with watercolors in her bicycle basket, in love with flowers long before she ever thought of growing them. Her garden at Hune began in 1991 from a single plot near the North Sea — her consolation after being refused permission to build a studio. It became something far greater. It became the creative expression of everything she was.

This was the kind of garden that changes people. The gardens that show you what is possible — and make you understand, standing there, that this is what a garden can be.

I know exactly how Claus Dalby felt. For me it was Sissinghurst. Ahead of me was a long path leading through a walled threshold and into garden rooms I couldn't yet see. I had never seen a more beautiful sight in my life. I stood there and understood, for the first time, that this is what a garden can be.

I came home a different person. Not inspired. But transformed. With a quiet certainty that I would spend the rest of my life trying to make something that remarkable.

That is what I think about when I look at the four tiny pots of verbena bonariensis under my grow lights. I can see exactly what they will become.

And I find myself wondering — who will stand in this garden when it blooms? What will they see? What seed will be sown in them that they aren't expecting?

The greatest gardens are transformative. Even the temporary ones. The small ones. The ones that are still just tiny leaves reaching toward the light.

Thanks for being here.
Sue