California garden designer Rebecca Sweet, a foremost expert in vertical gardening, will give it straight up to the Boca Grande Garden Club at 1 p.m. March 6 in the Boca Grande Community Center Auditorium.
Sweet wrote the national best-selling book, "Gardening Up! Smart Vertical Gardening for Small and Large Spaces," which has redefined vertical gardening.
Most people think vertical gardening is only about living walls. Sweet posits it is "gardening in the skinny and sometimes awkward spaces, arbors/trellises, living walls, and hiding eyesores in the garden with vertical elements."
Article Photos
Rebecca Sweet, garden designer
Vertical gardening has become a hot trend, whether it involves edibles, ornamentals or both.
Sweet, a lifelong gardener, will highlight a range of vertical gardening ideas from innovative living walls planted with grasses, natives or succulents, to creative layering techniques for the skinniest of spaces, to creative ways to reusing materials.
Owner of design company "Harmony in the Garden," Sweet is expert about design, plants, and beautiful spaces.
Fact Box
To Go
Who: Rebecca Sweet, "Vertical Gardening, Ornamental and Edible"
What: Boca Grande Garden Club
When: 1 p.m. March 6
Where: Boca Grande Community Center Auditorium
Why: What's New In Floral Design?
Cost: $25 for members, RSVPs required
Contact: Kay Ferland at (941) 924-7328
You should know: book sale and signing following presentation
Her gardens have been featured in "Fine Gardening," "Horticulture" and "American Gardener," as well as the PBS series "Growing a Greener World," "Martha Stewart Living" and "GardenLife."
Sweet writes a column called "Harmony in the Garden" for Horticulture Magazine and a lighthearted blog "Gossip in the Garden" which offers amusing observations and how-to videos for the novice up to the experienced gardener.
She is a founding member of the Garden Designers Roundtable, a group who believes a garden designer is an artist whose job is to reveal the innate beauty of a space, make something extraordinary from the ordinary, create magic from the mundane and inspire others to be creative.
She brings out the "hidden artist" in clients by blending their personal desires with regionally appropriate plants and natives to personalize gardens that are also layered, lush and environmentally friendly.
"Everyone has talents that are deep inside, sometimes brimming just below the surface waiting for a little encouragement," Sweet said.
Her presentation in Boca Grande will feature about 100 photos that use her approach. She will sell copies of her book afterward.
