“Living on this planet is not a reality but merely a passing moment in time and space allotted us for growth.” Madame Ganna Walska
Sometime in early 2023—or maybe it was late 2022—my friend Doreen Wynja asked me if I’d like to be included in a book she was putting together. It would be a curated collection of soulful gardeners—people passionate about plants—just like me!
We’d been friends for years, going back to at least 2015, so of course I said yes, even though I was not sure about opening my home for such a project. As we all know, pretty and designed has not been my objective over the years… it mattered to me how I’d be shown, and seen, but even the interview part was flexible, and something I could work with them on. So, despite my worries about fixing the place up, I said yes.
If you garden, you’ve seen Doreen’s photos somewhere. The most likely place is on Monrovia product tags, or their site, but her photos have appeared in print many times in magazines, books, and catalogs. Her work is outstanding and she’s a vibrant, strong, and creative talent. She’s someone who always has a vision and can bring it to life.
When I worked for her helping with her photo database I loved to stay at her house. It’s beautiful, and she always cooked the best food for us. Time away from home became a regular thing with her. She was supportive and kind about my health. Our evenings in McMinnville felt like mini-vacations.
So, I knew no matter what, I could trust her, and she knew what she was doing. But part of this process was personal, and I’ve avoided the more broad category of “gardening lifestyle marketing and work” due to my personal life. I knew with this project, I had to slowly become a bit more honest about that with my family, chosen family, and closest friends—and I have over the last few years. It didn’t need to be in the book, but I wanted to slowly move closer to it in my daily life. It’s always important to be you.
After rereading our section in The Spirited Garden just now, John (neé Giampaolo) and I sound like a goofy couple, bonded by our shared culture—and that’s true. But the truth is, we also have a non-traditional marriage. Since nearly the start we’ve lived platonically like siblings, with myself acting as the caregiver due to his autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and mental health issues. We’d married quickly, he’d masked very well, but he also had no idea what had bothered him his entire life. It was only my ongoing tears and breakdowns that led him to find help and answers.
Pushing him to change his life was one of the biggest challenges I have ever faced. I wasn’t going to abandon him the way I had been, and I couldn’t leave. I was too ill to go back to being on my own. I didn’t have a career or autonomy. But thanks to a prescription for Orladeyo arriving to treat the hereditary angioedema, being treated with dignity by professional colleagues, and often being extremely closely braced emotionally by friends who care about me, I kept at it. To save myself, I had to help save him. I did not have that in me, but I didn’t have a choice.
So often I wanted to curl up into a ball and gently float in virtually any body of water to feel like I was being held by something, anything—thank goodness for my hammocks. They can make decent stand-ins for people when you need them the most—especially during a pandemic.
It’s funny posting pictures online and sharing on social media as if things are ok when they definitely were not. At some point, I just stopped talking about “us” and focussed on myself again, or I stopped posting. John was not prepared to meet my needs, being unable to help himself, so I had to figure out what to do. Boundaries became key to enforcement in all things—and this was exhausting. It made the place I call home feel foreign to me. I was regularly called many horrible things in frustration and anger. Did I really want to be in a book? Could I hide what I went through? Again, I thought to myself, just trust Doreen.
I felt like a black hole of needs. I needed so much help and support, and am grateful it arrived in abundance over the years. What protected me the most was a chosen family of queer people—and some straight people too.
So Doreen really just wanted to focus on 3 things: my dinners in the back garden space, my houseplants indoors, and my work/love of seeds. I was overthinking things constantly, feeling exposed, wanting to hide, but learned to compartmentalize. We took small bites to make this all work. It took several different days in different seasons. Doreen came by to take a few garden shots before the dinner, but it may have been after. Luckily, the cats were there to help out, and Felix ended up being captured attacking me in the hammock. (LuLu, Oliver and Alfie did not make it into any photos. Felix has a few.)
Of course I felt badly the garden wasn’t prettier, and that I didn’t have a relationship with a partner who could help me, but you don’t see that. I did my best, and I think the spirit of that is captured.
Once John became more stable and calm, that was when I decided it was time for me to be myself as much as possible to remain comfortable in this situation. I took back my happiness. I had to. As my friend jokingly said to me this week, “Stand in your truth.” So at that point, I slowly became more open, telling others casually when I could in conversations that why yes, I’m cisgender and bisexual, or as I jokingly prefer to say, “I’m part gay”. Just because you’re married to a man, that doesn’t change.
I’d embraced this decades ago with my gay/queer friends, but I suppose this is me easing into being more public about it. Kind of like finally saying it out loud on my blog right now which I’ve never actually done. At school, it was not an uncommon topic of conversation with younger people and that surprised me a great deal. A few were shocked to know I’d ever been married to any men, and that still cracks me up.
Under the current administration, knowing what many of my trans umbrella friends are going through, honestly, this is the least I can do. How often do we see them featured prominently in garden marketing? Thanks to independent social media, a bit more, but at least for me, I get to joke about being like Vita Sackville-West without her status or money. But it’s hard to not be seen as the heteronormative one, or what I jokingly refer to as the homonormative ones. There are a lot of us, and it hurts not to see yourself reflected more in an industry you love. We don’t often aspire to the same things. We just want to be seen as we are. It seems like so little it makes me sad. At least we have the plants. Focus on the plants.
And don’t get me started on trad wives. They garden too. Sigh. They feel like the nightmare of stepping back into the 1980s. I knew even then that I was queer-ish, and it felt not-so-great, and not-so-safe. When I heard the administration wanted to shut down the LGBTQ+ national suicide hotline for youth last year, I felt like I was punched in the gut. I never used it, but there was a point in my teens when I likely should have…
So how do you present a non-traditional marriage in a book, or on the page? I’d say gingerly. For the book, I’d hoped there would be no insistence on there being a photo of us—and there wasn’t. John pretty much lives his life in his room when he is not at work and that’s how life goes here. I think the approach was to keep it private enough, and I’m pleased that worked out. I can untangle myself here.
Early on I’d realized John had issues with proprioception and sensory processing so working in the garden was a nightmare for him. I’ve never seen anyone who could break so many tools, and do tasks in such destructive ways. Luckily we’ve turned that to humor now, and he hires help for me. But his nickname is Donkey because of all of this, and even though he is ham-fisted, he can somehow decorate cakes and do small detail work in the kitchen, so he focusses on that, but only when he feels like it, or if he is interested, because if he’s not, he just won’t do it. So I let go of depending on these things—but he’s improved with making regular weekend meals.
It’s the small wins sometimes when setting someone up to succeed. I know because I’ve had to do this for myself too. But how do you prioritize and relax in your safe space at home when you have two people in such discordant states? You get by with a lot of outside support—until you’re calm like I am now and can do this on my own. Better communication helps too, but I am still so exhausted from this life experience. John, to his core, is a good and kind person. I know that.
The dinner photo shoot was on August 27, 2023. To prepare for it, I sort of had to “fake” a few dinners out of nowhere. Post-pandemic, no longer was I raising money for my back surgery, instead, funds went to pay for my new seed fridge, in the Seed Studio. I had a practice dinner, then the one Doreen took photos of, and a final one just to release the tension and celebrate that I’d made it that far. I bought flowers from around the neighborhood from gardeners who were practicing flower farming.
Sean and Preston were at the party when book photos were taken, along with Dan Heims and his lovely wife. That dinner took place not long after I’d had my final day at Cistus Nursery, and when I was preparing to go to school closer to full-time in order to finish my degree more quickly. Sean and Preston were also included in the book too, so it felt like an accomplishment of sorts to share the pages with them.
At that time, I hoped that finishing the degree would help me somehow, but I had no plan. No one goes into horticulture to get rich, so I knew it was gambling a bit, but there I was.
I recall that after the parties I felt like I’d not quite fully made it through the many levels of this challenge, but at least I could breathe again and get ready for the next bit of work. It felt lonely too, and it had hurt to think about other couples in the book, and feeling the sting of being an outsider who really hated being different than the status quo, but I embraced who I was, and worked through the typical feelings queer-ish folks feel. I changed a lot that fall, sent many texts and messages, received help and support in return. There were lots of laughs. And oh! the journaling…
Next came the portion inside, and Doreen helped to organize getting the final trim completed on the kitchen remodel that was never *quite* done. She called in backup, I reached out to my middle brother Tony to help out, and he was there for me.
It was a party all over again.
Help was called in for painting, and my friend Cynthia came over first to help with the entry and my “Ann cave” while Theo came over to help with the kitchen and the trim. Both are part of the extended queer family, and I really enjoyed spending time with them both during Christmas, sharing stories. Cynthia was very sweet and brought this pot holder she’d been keeping to give to me that reminded her of Felix. It was perfect!!!
The main color of my cave is Oyster Bar. It’s a dirty greige and if you know me, you know I live for oysters, so I fell for the name—just like a dumb plant cultivar. Sigh.
Theo is my friend who also celebrates the proper non-religious Catholic 12 Days of Christmas and Epiphany so we had cake. He is also the friend who took me on vacation during the worst of things, has been there supporting me since the first day we met in person in 2017, and he and his husband Kevin have provided a lovely fuchsia-filled corner for me to chill out and find peace in, in far southern SE near where I grew up.
He’s a fuchsia expert if you ever have any questions. Reach out to him here. (He has also delivered a lot of slices of cake from my favorite restaurant Papa Haydn to work for my birthdays. Yes, more cake. I love GOOD cake!)
Somewhere during the fall of 2023 I also gave a keynote talk about my life as a woman in horticulture, and that was when I first met Alexa Patti. We hit if off immediately, and knew we had a lot of fiery energy and shared passion for horticulture. Having graduated from the same program I was in, we immediately had that in common, but she is a plant savant, while I’m well, more of an unstable atom always looking to release extra energy to become someone new in order to find peace and stability. I do not sit still or stay the same for long. This works well for her, and now she’s my boss, but that’s a different story…
At some point during the chaos of the book, Alexa suggested that I come out to Little Prince of Oregon with my friends Evan and Loree to get more plants to stage indoors for the book. This was a great idea, and it was even more fun because the Production Manager Mike Hicks and his wife Megan BigJohn were also sharing pages. Doreen and I went back for a second shopping trip and then BOY! did I have some serious work to do.
Leading up to the main interior photos, things were chaotic, but I called in Evan to help me with the plants as much as possible. They were great at setting up some plant combos. (OMG so much talent with that one.) I was panicking. That was my role at this point. But by this stage I’d given up caring how I was seen, and I just wanted the photos and scenes to be magical. I hoped to inspire. I wanted to make people feel good.
Plants have kept me grounded through a lot, and I truly hope they can do so for others as well.
Before that long day, Doreen came over to quickly take the shots of me working with the seeds—and some closeups of some seeds and seed pods. Felix the toddler, well, he did what he could to get attention. He took breaks. It’s rough to be a star. (You can see the portrait of me standing at my drafting desk with him in the previous post.)
And it was all downhill from there… There were Easter eggs planted in photos, and I thought how alike that process was to writing, especially poetry. I hope to do more of that now as I clean up around here and try to better design my life. I’m ready.
When we wrapped, I was filled with a feeling of incredible accomplishment. I felt proud of Doreen, having watched her create her vision, and I delighted in watching her work. I’ve come to realize just how much I fall in love easily with what others love, feeling their excitement as they talk to me about it. It gives me great pleasure vicariously and in that I find inspiration—and likely much needed connection too.
“What do we wish for? To be whole. To be complete. Wildness reminds us what it means to be human, what we are connected to rather than what we are separate from.” Terry Tempest Williams, Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert (2001)
Next week we’re going forward by traveling somewhere to reconnect with my past. I’m going to a place I visited for a month after I’d finished writing a book at 17, just before it was published in 1992 with the help of the family business. Now out of print, the book paid for the first year of my undergraduate studies at Lewis and Clark College. But then I had to drop out. Something shocking to everyone.
Things fell apart for me. Which reminded me this week of the book Things Fall Apart (1958) by Chinua Achebe, set in colonial Nigeria, about colonialism. My LC college boyfriend was the son of Christian missionaries and they’d lived there for several years, and he introduced me to a whole wide world of so many contradictions and ways to see and write about them.
So I set off next week after arranging this 4 years ago, to spend time with someone I would have met if I’d stayed on the path I was on, and it would have been a whole different door into horticulture than the one I ended up walking through. There will be other gardeners too whom I’ve met along the way, mostly online, and I can’t wait to see them on their own turf—another beautiful part of the region I call home and love so much.
And there are rivers, and fly fishing, and it’s a special place to my father and eldest brother, where a man once lived and wrote, who inspired my explorer father, and Dad raised me to become a part of that world too.
Like the poet Michael Leunig expressed in his poem “When the heart“, my cut or cracked or broken heart has found that little bird to sing into it. So let’s roll…
Ann Loves Plants 
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