What is your personal aesthetic?

Do flowers get your attention or is it greens and textures?  It’s all in the details that feelings are expressed.  By using plants and accents appropriately, your style starts to shine.  Isn’t that what we strive for in our gardens and designed spaces?  Listening to instincts and recognizing what inspires us is the first step.  The second step is discipline – we must remind ourself while selecting plants what are our garden goals? Don’t completely lose yourself while shopping, just a little.

-Amy Pallenberg 

Gardeners on Nantucket are everywhere. They are so numerous, in fact, that they’ve become part of the island’s scenery, blending into car’s passing blur of trees and plants.  At Amy Pallenberg’s company, at first glance we are just another set of gardeners planting and pruning. Strangers who have dirt stains on their hands and cheeks as they arbitrarily water and plant.

But there is much more happening inside Amy’s Nantucket gardens, down to each specific task and each gardener who performs it.

I work with women who can name a flower by looking at its budding leaves, its fullest bloom and even once its shriveled and dead. They can look at a wild garden and know exactly what needs to be done to tame it, including each flowers’ individual and specific needs.

I work with women who, by the touch of soil to their fingers, will know exactly how much water each bed or pot will need for it to flourish. Too much water will drown the plants, and not enough will dry them out. They can alter the color of flower petals with their chosen amount of chemical compounds. Too much will turn them pink, but just the right amount will turn them blue.

Along with their knowledge of gardening, these women continue to bring their own growing desires and aspirations to each garden every day.

The Brazilian photographer, who can recite a flower’s Latin and English name upon request. The aspiring historian, who while pruning can recite you history lessons with a smile. The Balinese Princess from a mountain full of vanilla orchards. The yogi with her own jewelry business. The women’s advocate and talented ballet dancer. The soon-to-be PHD and mother-to-be who works until weeks of her due date. A boss who works meticulously with every single task. Whether she’s choosing flower arrangements, pondering asymmetrical planting designs, planting according to property’s weather patterns, or questioning pot designs, she is always working just as hard now as she was the first day of spring.

They aren’t just brilliant gardeners but artists, graduates, mothers, students, entrepreneurs and dreamers, the type of women I’d not only want in my gardens but in my home as friends.

- Ashley Bartolome

“In America there are many ways to carry things from place to place in the garden. Being that I am from Bali, this is how I would carry plants.”

- Ida Pineda

One of my favorite things about this time of year are the illustrious window boxes that dazzle Nantucket. Walking through downtown in the summer, one can not help but notice the beautiful window boxes that accentuate Nantucket buildings and businesses. Being a gardener, I am lucky enough to also work on maintaining window boxes that I and many enjoy observing all summer. Each box planter is unique to what it represents, and watching it flourish and gleam as a result of our specific care brings an even bigger appreciation in my observance. I can not wait for my summer weekend strolls in town to be highlighted with the multi-colored flowers smiling in the sunshine, a perfect complement to historic Nantucket.

- Lydia Lee Palka

For an avid gardener, the tiny miracles that appear throughout a day of gardening are so common place that I often find myself overlooking them. Quite often toiling in the garden can become more laborious than levitating, especially when I start treating planting a garden like a goal instead of a journey. As a practitioner of yoga and meditation it is woven into my daily life to pause often, to breath deeply and stay in the present. Easier said than done, right? So when I notice that my head is hurrying the day along or thinks that I should be anywhere but here, I start to remember how powerful a deep breath can be. Inhaling, filling the belly, exhaling, surrender to my surroundings and the moment…allow thoughts to do what they do…pass.

In a simple breath I can reconnect to what is 100% available: the present moment. Within that moment there is a wealth to experience, a slumbering bee drunken by new pollen on a blossoming euphorbia, the tiniest daffodil peaking its glowing face through a fence, the dance of a delicate tulip surrendering to the currents of the wind, so many things to notice.

I could say these are hidden treasures, tucked away to be discovered, but they’re not, they are out in the wide, open space around me, not hiding from anything. It is all too often my lack of attention that is keeping ME hidden from the magic. So, take a deep breath, wherever you are, and notice what beauty and surprises might be right in front of you…

Caution: deep breathing is contagious, (it is hard to do just one) and can lead to miraculous random discovery!

 - Leslianna Federici