A coastal cottage garden, edited with a city girl’s eye
Gardening, design, and seasonal living — learned in real time, with intention, simplicity and honesty
I grew up in coastal New England and spent years in the fashion closets of New York working in visual storytelling, learning how proportion, restraint, and seasonal rhythm shape everything we love.
Parsley & Petal is where that sensibility meets the garden.
The Seasonal Edit
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The Seasonal Edit is a recurring, design-forward checklist drawn from my own garden—what’s emerging, what can wait, and what deserves attention now. Practical tasks. Clear structure. Timed to the season as it unfolds.
The Seasonal Edit: March/April — Early Spring Garden Checklist
March and April shift the garden into active growth. This is the time to address cleanup, edging, selective pruning, minor lawn repair, and soil preparation before growth accelerates.
The Spring Reset: Lawn and Garden
Mid-March in the Northeast. While the stylist in me wants to edge the beds immediately, the gardener in me says, “Wait. It’s still too wet.”
The Seasonal Edit: A Blizzard Garden Checklist
Heavy snow and blizzard conditions can cause snow damage to shrubs, boxwoods, arborvitae, and other evergreens — but knowing when to intervene can prevent long-term harm.
A Home Run with Color: Designing a Cohesive Garden Palette
I used to be drawn to everything at the nurseries. Whatever caught my eye came home with me. But a garden begins to feel cohesive when you choose a few colors and let them repeat.
The Seasonal Edit: February—Late Winter Garden Checklist
This is not a month for dramatic changes. It’s a month for structure, maintenance, and preparation. What you do now determines how smooth spring will feel.
My Essential Garden Tool Kit
A good garden — like a good wardrobe — is built around a few pieces that do their job beautifully. The rest is noise.
What I’m Learning by Not Overplanting: A Lesson in Garden Structure
When we first moved into our house, every bare patch of soil looked like a problem to solve. I was a city girl who knew nothing about growing grass, much less a garden.