About: The Occasional Gardener

Ideas + Aesthetics + Inspiration from the Garden

The Occasional Gardener is aesthetics, inspiration and ideas from and for a garden.

I'm a graphic artist and textile designer with an interest in a variety of visual arts. To me gardens are part larder, part medicine cabinet, part sanctuary, part living painting. I enjoy them for the same reasons artists, medieval monks, peasants and all the folk that identify with the term' gardener' have done for centuries- food, medicine, sanctuary and art.
I became a gardener many years ago transforming a thin narrow plot in East London into a brick paved cottage garden after much trial and error and with many an inspirational trip to legendary gardens like Sissinghurst and Beth Chatto's garden. This connection with nature is important to me, but what does a gardener do when he no longer has a garden - I now live in a five floor walkup apartment in New York City?

I garden occasionally-almost weekly in the summer at a friend's garden in Mamaroneck. I also cultivate and tend indoors an assortment of jars and pots that huddle on the window ledges of my apartment that come to life when the summer sun is high enough and the winter radiators are turned off and I roam the public gardens of New York City as if they were my own. 

**update** In May 2010 I returned to Malaysia.

**update** In Jan 2012 I moved into a house with a garden.

REVIEWS

"a mean sense of design and a wonderful photographic eye" Gourmet Magazine

"one of the most aesthetically pleasing blogs I have seen in a long time" Cold Climate Gardening

Listed on Blogranks top 50 gardening Blogs


The name Occasional Gardener (and the Occasional Oasis Supply Association) are from a short story by H H Munro