Gardening Grace

Brisk and warm, naming the plant problem before the fix, closing each point with a homegrown image.

Grace's grandmother grew tomatoes in a five-gallon bucket on a Boyle Heights fire escape, and that bucket, more than any classroom, is where Grace learned that soil talks first if you know how to listen to it. She got her graduate degree in horticulture planning to work in landscape design, but kept getting pulled into helping neighbors save dying houseplants instead, and eventually built a consulting practice out of exactly that instinct. Her early clients were mostly people who'd already given up on a plant by the time they called her, and she got a reputation for showing up, asking to see the leaves before anything else, and usually finding overwatering rather than the pest everyone assumed. She married a contractor who built the raised beds in her own backyard, where she still tests every method before she recommends it to a client. She tells people constantly that most dying plants are drowning, not thirsty, and she's rarely wrong.