All while in meetings recently. 

And you know what? 

They’re right. 

I mean, kinda. 

This is Not a Hat*

Mom and I were walking through Dali paintings at the Indianapolis Museum of Art a few years ago. 

Actually walking through them because this was one of those exhibits like the Van Gough ones where they project the images on the floors and walls and you walk through. 

“I really like these,” she said. “They’re interesting.” 

This is my mom, Joy:

This is one of the paintings we were walking “through”:

Swans Reflecting Elephants, 1937.

Joy contains multitudes. 

Kiss all the time. Disco, occasionally.

For Harry Styles (2017), the cover article was in Rolling Stone

For Fine Line (2019), the cover article was in Vogue.

For Harry’s House (2022), the cover article was in Better Homes and Gardens. 

For Kiss all the time. Disco, occasionally.(2026), the cover article is in Runner’s World. It is a conversation with Haruki Murakami. (Excuse me while I faint.)

Those of you who are new here might have caught on during one of my talks that Harry Styles is my muse. The unofficial GOW “Musician at Large.” He doesn’t know he’s our musician at large, but he IS on our about page.

(Those who are not new are like “thank goodness we were worried about you because you had not been talking about Harry Styles much lately.)

His new album drops tomorrow. I’m listening to the one leaked song I managed to snag before midnight EST. (American Girls.) It’s a banger. A mellow dance tune. Perfect for work. And vibe coding.

This morning while making some collages to send to Aster Gardens I listened to Harry’s interview with Zane Lowe. He talks about how he had to go away after his last tour because and live some life because otherwise his next album would just be about being on tour*** and also he felt like he was going to get stuck in doing what he was doing the way he was doing it for the rest of his life and did he really want to do that? (He got on the music and fame treadmill somewhat unexpectedly when he was 16. He turned 32 on February 1.)

“I wanted to say yes to things I always said ‘no’ to.”

“I decided to ask myself ‘what’s the worst that can happen if I decide to trust someone and it doesn’t go the way I want?'”

“I don’t want to be that guy who is alone but’s saying, ‘I REALLY MADE IT.'”

“I wanted to be IN my life. Not just giving life to other people.” (Ok that is more of paraphrase.) 

“You know that feeling when you listen to a song for the first time and you think, ‘I get to have this song in my life forever.'”

You can see why I’m inspired by him. He’s also deeply weird, silly, takes risks, makes connections between all kinds of things, introspective, and is continually iterating. 

Venn You See It

Last night was the last session of Megan T. Morrison’s Rooted & Rising: A Leadership Program for women in Horticulture. 

Shout Out to my cohort:

• Connie Eaton
• Karen Limbert
• Liz Lark-Riley
• McKenzie Lain
• Licy George
• Alicain Carlson 
• Ashley Taylor
• Ali Pennell
• Kristina Smith

Y’all are some badass ladies and I am so grateful to have spent the past 6 months with you. 

Remember their names. You’re going to see them more often.  You should seek them out at gatherings. 

As part of our close out celebration we talked about a meaningful moment. 

Mine was the “I want” exercise. I mean, I started with “I want a pony,” because who doesn’t. 

But going deeper I kept coming back to wanting to make art happen. I also really wanted a sabbatical. (Don’t freak out people. I was SUPER DUPER FRIED at that point. Last year was hella rough.)

Then we all celebrated each other by spending time spotlighting each person and we all got to say what we loved about them, how they helped us, how they inspired us, etc. 

When it was my turn, here are two things that stood out to me. 

1. Everyone said I am my whole self, always. I am authentic and that made them feel safe to be authentic.

2. Meg said, “Katie you are the master of reinvention. And when you decide to do something, it gets done. Fast.” 

My big goal during the program was to make art happen in, especially, garden retail spaces. Which is what I’m calling “Adding another ring to my tree.” (It’s not a pivot. It’s an addition.)

For a while over the past 12 months I’ve been trying to figure out “How do I go from writing the Tech Connection column in Green Profit (and continuing to do so) and be THE TECH GUY of the industry to being the CREATIVE EXPERIENCES GUY? THE ART GUY?”

Not coincidentally, I can look to art for help.

In section 51 of Walt Whitman’s Songs of Myself, he writes, “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes)”.

This concept is not new but I made this Venn diagram  a month ago to make myself feel better about Tech + Art, which is really one big package called CREATIVITY.

We all contain multitudes. 

That is our superpower, if we choose to use it. 

I remember sitting in a Cultivate talk by Dr. Bridget Behe where she said, “OTHER INDUSTRIES USE OUR PRODUCTS (PLANTS AND FLOWERS) TO SELL THEIR PRODUCTS. WHY CAN’T WE USE THEIR PRODUCTS TO SELL OURS?” or something to that effect.

And then showed a Subaru ad with someone unloading a trunk full of plants. 

The Life of a Showgirl

I found Harry Styles in 2014. I had broken my ankle and my friend Sharna and my husband Joe took me to Best Buy and wheeled me around to pick out CDs. Remember those?

I got “NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL MUSIC Vol. 45” which featured the song, “Live While We’re Young,” by a band called One Direction. One of the members had a feud with parents online in relation to the song, tweeting something to the effect of, “I guess YOU’RE not getting some, LINDA.” Mind you, these pipsqueaks were around 18 years old at the time that song was released.

“Who ARE these people?,” I thought.

Down the rabbit hole I went and started learning about how they, the biggest boy band on the planet, marketed to their different segments of fans. And through them I found Taylor Swift and I watched HER marketing. 

And I STILL watch the marketing.

*** That’s the issue with Taylor Swift. While I LOVE the Orange/Teal color combo of her Life of a Showgirl album AND I think there are some genuine bangers on there, one thing you cannot say about her is that she is trying to live an actual life. I mean, she freely talked about that during interviews for this most recent album cycle.

She is a BOSS. I’m not debating the fact that she’s built a frickin’ empire. Don’t @ me. 

What I’ve also seen through this cycle is that the dots are not connecting on a deep level for fans and general public at large. YES there are lots of dance reels. But “This is a deep part of my life and persona and helped me understand myself/ be myself/ cancel the existential dread that I feel merely being alive right now” isn’t there. 

You can tell that all there is for her is work. 

And, she freely talked about THAT during interviews for this album cycle.

That’s the life of a business owner showgirl. 

What else is there?

“We’re not a horticulture company.” — They’re a “hey you like doing this kind of thing, here these plants will make it more aesthetic, more comfortable, more fun” 

“This isn’t a petunia” — It’s an invitation to people who never paid attention to plants to take a look.

“We’re not a garden center” — They’re a community hub.

What else is there? Everything. 

This whole newsletter could be summed up with two words: 

“Yes, and.”

To make a business EIGHT Million Dollars a year with email takes creativity. 

To get a customer to purchase again 7 days after their first order takes creativity. 

To make someone walk in the door of a plant shop they’ve walked by every day for 3 years takes creativity. 

To get a homeowner to rip out yew hedges and lawn and let you plant a meadow takes creativity. 

To get anyone to do anything they haven’t done before requires seeing the connections between what you offer and what they already love. 

That takes observation. 

That takes space. 

That takes synthesis. 

And, well, you’re moving into your busy season. 

So I made you this diagram. 

Let’s look at it again:

Is your business feeling stale? 

Then find a way to get out of the middle of it and live around it.  You’ve got PLANTS handled. 

Now work on the other stuff. 

Pick something that YOU are interested in and pull on that string. See where it takes you.

We all contain multitudes. 

Let that be your superpower.

What I talk about when I talk about running

I really encourage you to read this article.

(Did you know I used to run? I DO love Murakami’s book on the subject.)

But also, where I have I been? 

While Harry Styles was in between the end of his tour in 2024 and the release of this album in 2026 he was running. 

Every now and then he’d pop up at at a marathon under a pseudonym.

He ran Berlin in under 3 hours, which is serious. I couldn’t run a HALF in that amount of time. 

This newsletter is  one of my favorite things I create. 

The people who love it, LOVE. IT. and those are my people. If you love this newsletter, you’ll love working with my team and with me. If you don’t, you probably won’t. It’s one reason I write it. 

That being said, I haven’t written since November. And it might be somewhat sporadic. 

Because like Mr. Styles, I have to have a fully formed thought, and some examples to share. I have to have something useful. 

I’m also working on walking the walk that I’m talking right now. 

We made “couch” happen. (In 2022 I decided that every garden center would have a couch and we’re more or less there.)

In 2026 I’m making art happen. Or, better put, “Creative experiences.” 

Collage workshops, plant stakes, decoupage, garden portraits, pot painting, poetry, cooking, macrame. 

Wilmington, NC where I live is a bellwether town for the direction of culture. Where goes Wilmington, so goes the rest of the United States.  And where we’re going is workshops, and lots of them. 

I wrote about this last November, when I was freshly back from my tour de workshops and clients in Northern Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan. 

Then I came home and did more of it. 

That’s the thing you need to know about me: Whether it’s telling you how to do email marketing or run a creative workshop at your garden center or sell seasonal annual installs to your high end clients, I’m rolling up my sleeves and getting in there and doing it myself before I tell you how to do it. 

It’s real simple to say, “Never discount,” if it isn’t your money on the line. It is quite something else to prove you can help someone hit sales goals by getting in there with them and making it happen. 

So right now, I’m planning, hosting, marketing, selling, and refining lots of workshops at lots of places so I can help you do it well. (In addition to making clients eight million dollars with emails)

Growing takes time

The day you plant the seed is not the day the plant flowers. 

I started having this itch last year around February. The itch that I wanted something different from my work life than what I was then doing. 

I wasn’t sure exactly how to go about it. 

I credit Suzette Nordstrom from Monrovia for really helping me put a finger on it sometime in July. 

I got to work. 

It takes a lot of time to grow. 

I couldn’t write and serve clients and develop replicable, profitable creative workshops, SELL them, run them, and refine them so I could give them to you. 

Creativity has ebbs and flows. Sometimes I need to take in: Museums, books, gardens, music. Sometimes I need to make: write, garden, collage, paint. Sometimes I need to rest: sleep, walk on the beach.

So I’ll be in your inbox and out of it, on LinkedIn and not, but I’m always around. My personal instagram is a good one to follow for the creative projects.

I WILL see you a bunch this summer, introducing creativity to your everyday. Here’s where:

We Belong Together

You have the couch. Now get some people to sit on it. Here’s where to learn and create with me this summer:

Cultivate ’26 in Columbus, Ohio: July

1. 3-session arc: 
– Panel discussion: How to have profitable creative experiences at retail with special guests from Bailey Nursery, Tonkadale, and Koetsiers
– Hands-on: How to teach two different profitable experiences (this is where YOU get to make stuff with me!)
– Brass tacks: How to plan, market, and implement these experiences

2. Creative Networking session with Meg Morrison

Garden Center Conference & Expo in Nashville, TN: August

1. Overview of hosting creative experiences

2. Immersive workshop on how to make and teach creative experiences (This is NOT your typical conference session.)

Farwest in Portland, OR: August

1. How to Upsell Existing Customers with Engaging Email
2. Learn to teach 3-D Watercolor Collage

March Double Header

I am DELIGHTED to share my articles in GrowerTalks and GreenProfit with you this month. 

For GrowerTalks I spoke with lots of cool people about growing woody plants for cut flowers. 

For GreenProfit I spoke with lots of cool people about creating and hosting interesting experiences at garden retail. 

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Handy Links

Each newsletter always has a mix of fun and functional links.  

*A reference to The Treachery of Images, painted by René Magritte in 1929

This Garden Center Has Drawing Club

Why you should care about AI in email inboxes

The STAR method for interviewing potential employees

I’m enjoying this TV show

Need art supplies? Give Rebecca a shout or buy online

Ok, I need to go make some email flows, write a month of social media posts, finish those collages for Amanda, and analyze some reports. 

All typos are my own and I’m just gonna say I did them on purpose. 

As you can tell, snow doesn’t bother me, so if you’d like a workshop, an email migration, a project management system set up, website help or a talk this winter, reply to this email or book a discovery call and we’ll cook something up. (Even if you don’t like bananas.) 

What is your YES, and? Please tell me. Gardening and cooking? Collecting old lamps and travel to France? Running and sketching? 

Yours in new hobbies,

Art PS

That picture of my mama is from our trip to London over Christmas. I did get to make some art there and at home. I also got to make art with my new friend Natalie while I was in Minnesota, and I got 30 of my new friends to make art with each other and with Meg and me at our Women in Hort event in Minnesota. Enjoy!