I created Violetear Studio to bring more people into contact with the beauty of the garden. I want everyone to experience the joy of growing something, nurturing it, and taking the deepest pleasure in enjoying it. I hope it will will encourage you to build and share a growing space of your own.  Somewhere to watch the seasons, noticing the subtle changes of light and scent. Where you can find beauty every day.

My own garden is in the Berkeley hills, in the San Francisco Bay Area, on unceded Lisjan (Ohlone) territory. I grow using biodynamic, organic principles. It’s a joy to follow the rhythm of the year here, and experience all the idiosyncrasies of our coastal California climate.

Workshops & Talks: You can find information about my gardening classes here. These courses celebrate seasonal, sustainable growing practices and ways to bring the garden home. I give talks about gardening and using plants to make botanical art, usually at local nurseries and for gardening clubs. I also hold in-person workshops with more hands-on instruction on topics like gardening, garden design, and creating with garden materials. Finally, I’ve recently started offering some of these talks online, to make them more accessible. We give 5% of the revenue from every class to Women’s Earth Alliance, an organization engaging in environmental and social justice.

Garden People Podcast: through the Garden People podcast I interview designers, florists, growers, naturalists, chefs, artists and more about how gardens have shaped their lives and inform their work. I love learning about how gardeners came to be, as well as share tips and expert recommendations. I hope these stories can show us how to open the garden widely, especially to those who’ve been excluded historically.

Journal: Growing and gardening thoughts are in my seasonal blog.

Seeds: seeds from the garden are available in the shop. I send 5% of the revenue from seed sales to the Sogorea Te' Land Trust.

Welcome to the garden, I’m so glad to see you.

- Jill

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Beginnings:

My adult gardening life may have started with dahlias — staring at a fistful in a jam jar, time seemed to stand still. I marveled at the colors, the size, the whorls and curves of the petals. The next thing I knew I was pushing two five-foot beds into the turf of the wooly back garden of my law school apartment.  Just planks supported by rebar and filled with good compost and too many tubers.  I was hooked. So were the gophers.  

Or maybe it started with the bare root roses I ordered and for whom I dug five holes in the garden of our new home in the middle of a January night because I had back-to-back hearings and no other time would do.  I remember the mist from my breath catching in the light of my headlamp and smiling as I huffed in chill of that crystalline air, feeling I was doing the most right thing ever.

It may have even been earlier, when, fresh out of college I would brave the New York subway carrying armfuls of cherry blossoms wrapped in paper. Wedged against fellow commuters and whispering apologies. Beaming as I felt the thrum of the branches pushing out blossoms in spite of the sleety gray city surrounding them.

No matter how it started, somehow, I returned to gardening.  Fell headlong, and have never looked back.  

Though I’ve gardened off and on my entire life, I didn’t realize how much I needed the garden until 2013 when I was a first-year legal aid attorney with a huge case load, providing free civil legal services to low-income people.  I cared deeply about these cases and they could be painful. 

I would come home after work and lose myself in the garden.  It felt incredible to find peace and wonder there, when the world bound in my job could be so heartbreaking.  As I worked to clear space and rehabilitate the soil, I read everything I could.  I planted and weeded.  Learned Latin names.  Occasionally forgot to water.  I started seeds with my toddler. I shared plants with neighbors.  The joy I felt in talking about how to cultivate them was infectious. 

It was then that I realized: I wanted to give people the sense of belonging I had in the garden. Something only soil and nurturing plants through each season provides, and can never be lost.  What I wanted to share, what was missing from so many lives around me, was beauty.  

It felt almost subversive – wasn’t beauty insubstantial?  Could it be of any value?  I humbly submit that it can be.  To share beauty, to experience it, is to acknowledge the dignity and humanity in us all.  To say beauty is not important – or not important for some, not important at this time in your life – is to deny that uniquely human experience.

I began to teach small gardening classes. I wanted to show others how to create that joy, that beauty in their own lives. I also wanted to know more about how gardeners and garden-people enter the garden.  What was the spark? How can we learn from these stories so we can bring more people in?  Especially those who haven’t had access? I created the Garden People Podcast to continue those conversations.

So here it is: my offering of shared beauty and shared stories. To celebrate the growing of things. To learn about the garden and the gardener. With lots of plant lists. It’s a pleasure to have you here.