We were lucky to catch up with Chelsea Wesley recently and have shared our conversation below.

Chelsea, appreciate you joining us today. Risking taking is a huge part of most people’s story but too often society overlooks those risks and only focuses on where you are today. Can you talk to us about a risk you’ve taken – it could be a big risk or a small one – but walk us through the backstory.

I took a big risk when I was in my late 30s. I had survived cancer at 31 and then took another risk to go into art full time. My ceramics and sculpture business had regular customers and shows, but I am just not a good schmoozer, which seems to be a requirement in fine art. I was getting tired of lugging the crates of work, and shipping fragile items is a nightmare.

I had been working with indoor plants since college and decided to go back to school to learn landscape design and arboriculture. I did a heavy load of classes, every evening to get it done quickly not knowing how I would do in school.

Maybe it was my passion for plants, but I found it to be way easier to do well in college as an adult. When you are trying to avoid the 9-5 you have more motivation to learn and make connections. When you are young in college you don’t really know what you want your days to look like, or how much you will loathe a timeclock!

I got my Certificate of Horticulture and went on to get many more certifications, now knowing I could study and pass the exams no problem. In just 5 years I have my own thriving landscape design business and I get to create living art installations that can be walked through, engaging all the senses.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

My life has always been filled with Art & Plants…
I learned to kitchen garden from my Dad, making salads in my backyard playhouse. And I’ve been an entrepreneurial artist since age 12. Early on in my career I worked in interior plant design and got the plant obsession.
So now I’ve combined my love of art and gardening with Sweetgrass Gardens. Using the textures, colors, and changing forms of plants to create scenes. To me, gardens are installation art, an ever-changing joy to the senses.

I want to change how we see our outdoor spaces. Not as something to control and constantly mow or trim, but as shared spaces that are beautiful to us and the creatures we share them with. I use trees that are the right size for urban spaces (so they don’t get cut down later) and plants appropriate for our climate.

I have been focusing more on native plants lately as we enter another drought cycle. We need to be able to landscape with plants that don’t need constant rain via irrigation.

My way to create positive change is to include edible plants, natives, and food forest principles into designs to create places for people and wildlife to enjoy together.

Each landscape design package is custom fit to the families needs, and each microclimate on the property. They get all the data, bloom charts, water needs, quantities and the map of where to place each plant.
For the installation process most clients hire me for project management which I call “Artistic Integrity Management” I am on site to make sure the vision comes to life and problem solve when we find surprises underground. (We always do) I also love to hand-pick the plants and stone features.

Unlike many big firms I don’t have a list of 20 plants to use over and over. I have palettes of Mediterranean, coastal, modern, edible, hardy natives, moon gardens, just waiting for the right spot!

The greatest joy I find as a landscape designer is creating habitat for pollinators in ecological designs, creating rainwater catchments, reducing lawns. That first butterfly visit, or rainstorm that fills up the dry creek bed we dug is wonderful to watch.

Have you ever had to pivot?

Did anyone else yell “Pivot!” nearly all the time during the Covid years? It became a joke around here, and I hate to be another one of those stories of pivoting because of the pandemic, but I think it really changed the trajectory of my life.

I’ve always been obsessed with trees so in school I thought I would like to work as an Arborist. Then I got a job doing the work and hated it. The company culture was terrible and I ended up injecting trees with fungicide. Working with chemicals is not what I had envisioned. Luckily I got laid off from there when the pandemic hit and ended up working at a nursery where I solved plant problems all day and did designs on the fly.

It was super intense with lines down the street and a constant barrage of questions. But, I learned to identify plants from one leaf in someone’s hand! And a big one: how to deal with warring spouses trying to agree on a style. Okay that’s still awkward.

What’s been the best source of new clients for you?

Knowing where my clients go to look for my services. People want referrals. I have cards up at the local nurseries and have built relationships with the people working there who will refer me when someone needs design. Just having someone say, “I know her, she does good work” is better than all the advertising in the world.

Word of mouth has been the second best, it took a couple years to get the first client from a referral, but now they come in every month.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.sweetgrassgardens.net/
• Instagram: @sweetgrass_gardens
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sweetgrassgardens