About This Journal

I wanted to create this Journal to share my lived experience — specifically, gardening at my home, Hilltop, in East Tennessee.

I’ve been gardening since my late twenties, but this property and this home feel like a culmination of everything that came before it. Hilltop has pushed me beyond the boundaries of anything I’ve ever done — in the food I’m growing, the flowers I’m tending, the design work I’m learning through trial and error, and the skills I’m slowly bringing into the home.

This Journal is not intended to be fast-paced.

Cleaning out the potager beds, getting ready to begin again

It follows the seasons. It moves the way a garden moves. In many ways, it’s a record — almost a documentation — of my practice as it unfolds. You won’t find tidy before-and-after stories or instant results. What you’ll see instead is the middle: gardens in progress, ideas being tested, things revised, rearranged, and sometimes abandoned altogether.

This isn’t a place where I’m trying to be performative. It’s not meant to be slick, quick, or optimized. I hope you don’t feel like you’re slogging through the mud when you read it — there’s humor here, and there are moments of lightness — but entertainment isn’t the point. Showing up honestly is.

In some ways, I hesitated to start this Journal at all. I had to wrestle with questions of value — about documenting my work, about whether anyone would even show up to read it. But in the end, that question stopped mattering. This is something I wanted to share. If nothing else, it serves as a record for myself. And if it resonates with others, I consider that a gift.

Here, you’ll see my gardens as they actually are. You’ll see mistakes and multiple revisions. You’ll watch me learn practical skills over time. I’ll share photographs of things that went beautifully — and of things that didn’t. You’ll see food, flowers, and home life woven together. And as the Journal grows, you’ll start to notice repetition: the return of seasons, familiar tasks, and places in the garden revisited year after year.

What you will not find here is optimization culture.

You won’t find perfect systems or five-step formulas. You won’t find isolated homesteading or nonstop hustle framed as virtue. You won’t find content created just for aesthetics or content’s sake. And you won’t find fear-based narratives about self-reliance.

My hope is that this becomes a place you can settle into — a place where you can take what’s useful to you and leave what isn’t. There’s some telling here, but mostly there’s showing.

The name Proper Useful comes from my love of English gardens and the language around them. In that context, “proper” doesn’t mean rigid or correct—it means something more like truly, deeply, or well and fully so. Useful in the best sense of the word: things that earn their place by being lived with.

This Journal is loosely braided from three strands.

Place — Hilltop itself, and the spaces within it: the Courtyard, the Potager, the Rose Rondel, the Woodland Garden, the Oak Tree & Elm beds, and other areas still taking shape.

Practice — sowing seeds, making food, floristry, learning through failure, repetition, and rearranging.

Philosophy — why any of this matters at all, and why living this way feels grounding and worthwhile to me.

You don’t need to read in order. Jump around. Come back later. Pick it up and put it down as it fits into your life.

And if this way of working, noticing, and living resonates with you — if it feels like something you’ve been looking for — I’m so glad you’re here.