Hilltop

I live at Hilltop, in Friendsville, Tennessee.

The property spans just under seven acres—five wooded, two cleared—and when we arrived in the summer of 2022, most of the open land had already been landscaped. But it wasn’t a garden.

The plantings were practical and commercial in nature: overgrown nandina, viburnum, forsythia—shrubs chosen to be pruned occasionally and largely ignored. There were plants, and there were beds, but there was no sense of intention or relationship between the house and the land around it. Nothing invited you to linger. Nothing asked to be used.

I knew early on that I wanted something different. Not just beds, but rooms. A garden that engaged with the house and daily life—one that could be walked through, worked in, sat within, and returned to again and again.

Hilltop circa 2022

The work began with removal. Pulling out what had outlived its purpose. Making space.

The first true garden took shape in the courtyard, where I removed everything from the two existing beds along with four small trees. From there, the project expanded outward: sections of the future rose rondel were dismantled and reshaped, the four raised vegetable beds grew into a full potager, the oak tree beds were developed, and new areas were created with food production, flowers, and habitat in mind.

Over the past three-plus years, Hilltop has evolved steadily—sometimes quickly, often slowly. What you’ll see here is not a finished reveal, but a progression: before, raw, and after. Plans that worked, ideas that didn’t, spaces that changed as my understanding deepened.

My vision has always leaned romantic and old-fashioned in spirit. I’m drawn to English Arts & Crafts–style gardens—places like Hidcote, Sissinghurst, and Coleton Fishacre—where beauty, structure, and usefulness are inseparable. Gardens designed not to impress from afar, but to be lived in. Worked in. Returned to daily.

The house at Hilltop is modern. The garden is not. And that contrast has become part of the language of the place.

I don’t want a garden solely for cutting beautiful flowers—though I do that. I want one that feeds us, supports nature, offers places to sit and host and mark time. A garden that holds memory. One that feels as integral to daily life as the house itself.

This journal begins here because Hilltop is where the work became larger than individual plants. Where growing, making, and living began to overlap. Where the idea of shaping land slowly—and with care—became a practice rather than a project.

This is the place from which everything else follows.