Gardening books, photography, talks, lectures, international garden tours, and eventually, designing gardens all followed.
“I didn’t intend to design gardens,” Nan says, “but after all those years looking at gardens, talking with designers, dissecting their compositions, combinations, and colors to write about — along with experimenting in my own garden — I realized I had undergone an apprenticeship.”
Still, Nan’s approach is uniquely her own. Because of her biology background, Nan understands the plants and the land in ways few other designers do. As a California native, the seasons, soils, and waterwise practices are in her DNA. She has been a long time proponent of drip irrigation and installed her first drip system in her own garden in 1986.