Hi, I’m Leelee – Welcome to Leelee’s Garden, my plant and flower filled corner of the internet. It’s so good to meet you!
While we have a whole event and flower team who you’ll meet through working with us, I want to share my story and why I started Leelee’s Garden…
As a little girl, I was always drawn to plants. I spent summers picking vegetables and blackberries while visiting my grandparents in the Central Valley of California. I’d lay on the floor of my great grandma’s mobile home, leafing through rose catalogs, circling flowers I dreamed of growing. When I was around 10, inspired by Mary’s “bit of earth” she asked for in The Secret Garden, I even ripped up a tile side yard to start my own “Leelee’s Garden.”
My first grown-up “Leelee’s Garden”, in Wicker Park, Chicago
In that challenging time of young adulthood, I bought seed packets from Target, and asked my first landlord if I could grow a garden in our parking lot. Right away, even after some failed attempts, I was hooked! And I found that learning about gardening and growing beautiful things helped me feel better.
With a newfound passion for growing, I found my way to become a Master Gardener through the Chicago Botanic Garden. Around then I had the ah-hah moment I’d been waiting for…the Oh-sh*t! THIS IS WHAT I WANT TO DO FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE idea – start a business called Leelee’s Garden.
I saw a space in my mind, full of plant and flower workshops, plants everywhere, and garden-inspired food. To start moving towards that vision, I took community college courses in horticulture and floral design at night, and eventually left my corporate operations management career to pursue my dream.
As tends to happen, over time I got busy and forgot my love of plants and that childhood wonder with growing things. It wasn’t until my early twenties, after moving post-college to Chicago for my first corporate job, when I started really struggling with anxiety and stress, that I decided to start a garden again.
Anxiety is so multi-faceted and hard to pin down. Everyone has their own experience of it. I’ve had multiple iterations. From crushing panic attacks after being robbed at gunpoint in my twenties to just an overwhelming sense of LOST around what I wanted to do with my life, it’s taken on different forms and severity and even disappears for years at a time. Two things (in addition to professional help and supportive relationships) that have always helped are: getting my hands dirty growing, and creating art.
In the 11 years since I had that ah-hah moment, I’ve learned that that the dream rarely takes you exactly where you thought you’d go and the path towards it is a windy one. Since starting Leelee’s Garden in 2015, at first with landscape design, and then with teaching workshops, I found a knack and passion for teaching, for breaking down botanical projects into easy steps, and for inventive, immersive floral design.
These days I don’t have that restaurant plant space I first imagined, but I have taught hundreds (500+) of plant and flower workshops to audiences and large companies around the world, and shared my childhood wonder for plants and flowers that I still carry to this day with thousands of guests and to our floral clients too.
