Small good gardens
Nick started Bluebird Growers in 2014. It was a small working farm on the Northside in Jacksonville, Florida. He was growing and selling herbs and plants at markets and directly to wholesalers and grocers. He wasn’t offering landscaping services then, but the ethos was the same as it is today: a love for horticulture and a deep care for the living world.
Nicks’ first logo in 2014 made by Buddy Hale
Fun fact: Nick and I met at a farmers market in Murray Hill in 2016. :)
By 2017, when we welcomed our daughter Clementine into the world, we had moved into a small one-bedroom condo with a loft in Ponte Vedra Beach. We had moved on from the farm to focus on our family and grow my photography business, but we still wanted a place to put our hands in the soil so we built a little garden bed out of reclaimed wood, right there in the condo community. It was a modest thing, but it gave us so much pleasure. My favorite things we grew were orange cherry tomatoes, sweet and delicious straight from the vine. We loved discovering how much we could grow with some Florida sunlight and a little care. Even as our lives changed, growing things remained part of our everyday life.
In 2019, Nick began working for another landscape company doing hands-on installations for hourly pay. For two years, he worked long, physically demanding days. The work was gritty, messy, and exhausting but it revealed another side of his capabilities. He was learning how to take a garden from an idea to something planted and growing, bringing his knowledge of horticulture into the physical work of making a landscape. We began to see how those skills could shape a new chapter of Bluebird Growers. Our own small gardens over the years had shown us what was possible in limited spaces.
In 2020 we moved to Jacksonville beach. We created a little backyard garden that we loved. As the pandemic settled in and life changed for all of us a fire was lit in. We often stayed up late dreaming up ideas, imagining how our interests and experience could come together to create the Bluebird Growers we know today. How could we bring art and horticulture together? And how could we build a business that gave us room for both? We weren’t nervous. We were excited. We felt capable, confident, and ready to see what we could make of it. I had been transitioning my photography business toward offering only film sessions, and after reading Amy Merrick’s On Flowers, I felt inspired to load a roll of film into my camera and photograph Nick’s gardens. The things we each loved were finding their way into the same work: his plants, my photographs and stories, and all the ideas we kept each other awake talking about. We made a good team, with plenty of enthusiasm and a little blind faith.
By 2021, we were ready to begin this new adventure. To save as much as we could, we chose to move into a more affordable apartment off the highway with our two young children. We had less space, but we had a balcony, and soon it became a beautiful little garden. We grew tomatoes, ranunculus, beans, lettuce, herbs, and whatever else we could find room for. It was inspiring to see how much life could grow in such a small, seemingly unremarkable space. Right outside our door, we had food to pick, plants to tend, and flowers to watch opening. It was honestly so cool to see what we could grow there. That little balcony gave us somewhere to put our care and creativity while we worked toward what came next. It helped make the apartment feel like ours, and it taught us, in a very personal way, how much a small garden could mean. Growing things had always been part of Nick’s life. Now, with his installation experience and our own years of making gardens wherever we lived, we could see how to bring that care into other people’s spaces.
We launched this new chapter of Bluebird Growers in mid 2021 and threw ourselves into everything: partnering with local businesses like The Heirloom Yard teaching workshops, designing and installing gardens, taking beautiful film photographs, attending markets and talking to anyone who would listen about the possibilities of ecological landscaping. We had so much we wanted to share, and we were excited to get out there and share it.
While BG expanded, and by 2022, we moved again and this time into a slightly larger townhouse with a lovely green space out back. After growing so much on a little balcony, having room to spread out felt like an invitation. We installed beautiful corten steel beds from Veradek and filled them with vegetables, herbs, and flowers. The warm, rusty color of the steel looked so beautiful against all that green. We loved that garden. There was something deeply satisfying about having food and flowers growing together just outside our home. Our townhouse backed up to a huge nature preserve, and hummingbirds visited daily. That was one of the most wonderful parts of living there. By then, we had gardened in several very different spaces; A reclaimed-wood bed at our condo, a balcony full of pots at our apartment and now steel beds behind a townhouse with a nature preserve beyond them. Each place had its own possibilities and limitations. We kept learning what we could grow, where we could make room, and how to make a rented space feel personal.
And boy, did we grow. Bluebird grew and grew, and we found ourselves meeting more people, making more gardens, and watching the ideas we’d talked about late at night become our everyday work. As people emerged from the pandemic, many were ready to give their outdoor spaces some attention. They wanted to freshen up their landscapes and make the places where they’d spent so much time feel more beautiful and alive. We were thrilled to help. There was real momentum, and we welcomed it with all the enthusiasm we had.
Then, in 2023, life surprised us again! We welcomed our daughter Marigold into the world and moved into a rental home in St. Johns. We were suddenly a family of five. Henry and Clementine became older siblings to a tiny new person, and Nick and I found ourselves back in the tender, consuming days of caring for a newborn. We were getting to know her while settling into another home and continuing to grow Bluebird. Looking back, I can trace those precious growing years through the places we lived and the gardens we made. I remember what we were growing by how old the children were and vice versa. We didn’t know how long we would stay in each home, but we planted things anyway. We wanted something to tend and enjoy while we were there. Those gardens became part of our family’s life. They gave us food to pick, and flowers to look forward to, animals to see and something to care for together as a family. They also taught us what it means to make a garden in the kinds of spaces so many people have: a modest patch of ground, a patio, a balcony, a rented home where you’re living for a few years while figuring out what comes next.
And here we are today…
Today, it’s 2026, and we live in a rental home, with sod 360 around us, on a retention pond/lake in St. Johns. We have a highschooler, a 3rd grader and an adorable albeit precocious 3 year old. There are art projects in various stages of completion, and books strewn about, and three much bigger children filling the rooms. It’s wild to think about how much life has happened between that first little garden in 2017 and where we are today. And after writing this I realize how incredible the journey as been. But I still think about that balcony, and the hodgepodge reclaimed-wood bed, and the hummingbird townhouse garden where we were so thrilled to finally have a hose and not just a watering can! Each one made our everyday life a little richer. Each one helped us feel at home. Those experiences have stayed with us and it is part of why this next chapter of Bluebird feels so personal. We had big hopes for Bluebird in 2021, and we still do. We hoped the business would support our family while leaving us time to enjoy the life we were building. We liked keeping things small and doing the work ourselves but running a small business while raising children changes your understanding of what you can give. As our children grow into even bigger longer and more talkative humans (and we look toward the horizon into our fifties) we’re thinking more carefully about what we can realistically achieve now. We’re proud of the big and small and everything in between gardens and landscapes we’ve made and grateful to everyone who has trusted us. Now we want to focus on smaller projects where thoughtful changes can make a meaningful difference, Our own small gardens over the last 10 years taught us how much those spaces can mean. They helped each place feel like home, even when we didn’t know how long we would stay.
We’re also excited to make teaching a bigger and more regular part of Bluebird. Working on someone’s garden is one way to share what Nick knows; gathering in a backyard and helping people understand their own garden is another. We will begin to offer workshops hosted in people’s backyards with an accessible fee (under $60) so neighbors and friends can come together to learn. Our hope is that a backyard workshop becomes something people invite a neighbor to, and that what they learn finds its way into gardens throughout the community.
And in looking forward in 2027 we hope to return to farmers markets bringing Bluebird back to the kind of place where Nick and I first met. We would love to sell pollinator plants, and native plants, fine art prints and specialty merch to encourage the ethos we love: Small Good Gardens. This is the grassroots direction we want to be in: meeting people close to home and building relationships through time spent together.
This next chapter feels familiar already. And, we are ready for you!
