Quick Takes With: Christin Geall

When we asked Christin Geall for “the real reason she gardens,” the floral designer, writer, photographer, and educator responded with a literary quote: “I’m borrowing from Joan Didion who said the following about writing, but you can switch up the verb: ‘I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.’ ” To Christin, gardening isn’t just about growing plants; it provides a lens through which to understand the world. 

A trained horticulturalist (via the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew), committed environmentalist (double major in Environmental Studies and Anthropology), and thoughtful writer (MFA in Creative Nonfiction), Christin now travels widely to teach, speak, and write. Below, she shares the reasons she’s conflicted about modern-day gardening, the sure-fire method of extending the vase life of cut flowers, and the garden she calls “humbling, inspiring, and if you read his poetry as a part of your visit, transformational.”

Photography by Christin Geall, unless otherwise noted.

Your first garden memory:

I loved bugs as a child and made circuses for caterpillars from twigs, leaves and flowers. When I was very young, I discovered ants on peony buds. I suspect they were at my height and I remember watching them, not knowing why they were there or why they seemed so busy. Today I know it is a kind of mutualism—the ants eat sugars from nectaries and protect the flowers from other insects.

Garden-related book you return to time and again:

The Phaidon books FLOWER: Exploring the World in Bloom and PLANT: Exploring the Botanical World. They’re art history books predominantly, but packed with botanical, political, and historical insights. This isn’t really a plug, but I often return to my first book [Cultivated: The Elements of Floral Style] when I’m feeling flat about my writing. If I can appreciate decent sentences about plants, it helps me write more of them. It’s the same with gardening to some degree—if I look at pictures of past successes, it fuels my hope for the future.

Instagram account that inspires you:

@sustainablefloristry out of Australia.

Describe in three words your garden aesthetic.

Productive. Collected. Confused.

Plant that makes you want to run the other way:

Amaranth: I love it as a cooked vegetable and know it is fabulous as a cut flower, but just looking at those seeds makes me itch. Tied for first place in the cringey cultivated category is Chinese Forget-Me-Not (Cynoglossum amiable), which has seeds capable of sticking in your socks (through multiple washes) and is the bane of pet owners. It’s one to be careful with, given its pioneering+settler instincts.

Plant that makes you swoon:

I went to South Africa last year and swooned over so many plants, it felt like a rapture. (I’ve still not recovered).

Hardest gardening lesson you’ve learned:

This is a tough one to write: gardening today isn’t very ecologically-friendly. Or at least not the type of contemporary gardening that demands raised beds, hardscaping, irrigation, fencing, greenhouses, soil amendments, bedding plants, lawn care, plastic, netting, pumps, lighting, etc., etc. As gardeners, I think we all should consider what our hobby or work demands of the earth. Western culture gave us the idea that we could or should have our own little Eden and, more recently, that gardening or floral design is a form of “self-care.” It would behoove us to challenge these individualistic notions and consider less consumptive ways of engaging with nature. Basketry and forest bathing hold promise.

Unpopular gardening opinion:

Carbon emissions have recently been the focus of environmental campaigns, leading to exhortations to buy flowers that are “grown not flown,” “local,” or regionally produced. Landedness has also come to define the sustainable floristry and garden-to-vase movements in some ways, but many things contribute to the carbon footprint of flowers beyond travel, namely the level of mechanization involved in production, the type of flower being grown, the manner in which it was grown, vase life, heating, soils, and/or the materials used to package flowers and plants as they reach the consumer. I just can’t accept that a local one-and-done-irrigated-peat-and-crate-grown forced tulip is a sustainable flower. Sorry.

Gardening or design trend that needs to go:

I researched the history of bioprospecting and the business behind bedding plants for my next book and was appalled to learn about the vertical integration of the industry today, with large corporations pumping out masses of summer annuals, most in peat-based soil mixes (thankfully banned in the retail horticultural sector by the government in the UK—with some exceptions but peat will be fully transitioned out by 2030). I was so traumatized I began to look at garden centers not just as candy shops but as sites of ecological abomination. The short answer for North America: big-box bedding plants and basket stuffers. The shortest answer of what needs to go: peat. [See Just Say No to Peat: It’s Time to Rethink the Compost and Soil You Buy.]

Old wives’ tale gardening trick that actually works:

Hot-water dipping cut flowers. I have an electric tea kettle I keep in my flower studio for submerging the stems of poppies and other plants. Just a ten second dip in boiling water or so can make a real difference in terms of a flower’s vase life. Sarah Raven has a great guide for northern hemisphere growers in her book The Cutting Garden.

Favorite way to bring the outdoors in.

I once had a little flower farm, so you would think this answer would include a bouquet, but I often used little specimen vases to appreciate single flowers in the house. Growing my own fruit, herbs and vegetables gives me joy: I love a bounty, particularly in the kitchen. I’m also a Christmas person, game for swagging, wreaths, boughs, dried plant creations, Brussel sprout “trees,” you name it…and I love the scent of a big evergreen in the house.

Every garden needs …

… areas of shade. Over a hot and humid summer, I’ve begun thinking about how I might design my garden on Martha’s Vineyard (and even wondering if I should have a garden at all). The landscape moves between meadow, forest, and wetland, and is not calling to be gardened (save the purging of invasive species). This is making me think harder about what gardening means to me. How much do I want to impose my aesthetic on the land? What is the right choice ecologically? I still want to care for plants on a small scale, so I’m attracted to a kind of cool intimacy—to ferns, mosses, water, and stone. All these visions are all set in shade.

Tool you can’t live without:

ARS needle-nose pruners. They cut holes in my pockets over time, but they’re lightweight and sprung nicely.

Go-to gardening outfit:

Belted old jeans and a collared shirt.

On your wishlist:

A mason or stone worker. As mentioned, I’m thinking about stone these days—how it can work as a thermal mass, how planting around glacial erratics might work, how to work with stone walls, and wondering how I might encourage lichens. In my wildest fantasies, I think about how stone might bridge indoor and outdoor space.

Not-to-be-missed public garden/park/botanical garden:

The Merwin Conservancy on Maui. In the 1970s, an American poet and his wife bought 19 acres of exhausted agricultural land and slowly, over 40 years, while living off-grid, planted more than 3,000 trees. Today, the “garden” is a diverse tropical forest holding an important collection of rare and endangered palms. The place is humbling, inspiring, and if you read his poetry as a part of your visit, transformational.

Anything else you’d like us to know?

I found this quote really spoke to me: “One of the commitments that I’ve found with biodiversity and betadiversity conservation is that it’s not aesthetic conservation. It’s not: ‘this place is beautiful I’m going to conserve it’. It’s: This place is necessary.”

Thank you so much, Christin!  (Follow her on Instagram @cultivatedbychristin.)

For our full archive of Quick Takes, go here.