New Seasons
Welcome to Growing Conditions, a new publication and newsletter from Plantkind, an outdoor spatial design company.
Save the date, Plantkind is sharing two very special landscape design projects on the California native garden tour this coming Saturday, May 3rd in Oakland and El Cerrito. More details coming in the next newsletter in a couple days.
There's a variety of updates below, including some big personal news, sneak peek at upcoming newsletter topics, bit about the goals of this newsletter, more on Plantkind's background, and some reflections about hanging out on the internet again.
Re-Introduction as Lily
I'm excited to share my name is Lily (she/her) now! It's been so lovely to be more fully myself, to continue embracing my queerness, and explore as I'm transitioning into this new season of life.
Pretty wild to realize you have the ability to grow beyond, to be yourself, and that you can't really be anything other than who you are. Looking forward to continuing as Lily for the remainder of my time on this planet as we keep moving forward, ever-growing and expanding.
Thank you for everything to the friends, family, clients, community, and everyone that has come along on this journey in the most supportive and loving ways imaginable.
Setting the Stage for the Newsletter
Garden making is such a mysterious process, and while it's good to embrace that, there's value in more transparency and a look behind the scenes.
Growing Conditions is a newsletter about designing outdoor spaces for living. Spanning beyond the ecological realm, it serves as a resource center that gathers the functional objects, outdoor furniture, and architectural features that give form to gardens. Published alongside personal reflections on running a landscape design studio in California and digging into the various fields of research, tools, and systems.
The goal of the newsletter is to provide something that is enriching, supportive, and educational. If you're thinking about gardening more at home, if you're considering embarking on a landscape design project of your own, or if you're someone who is growing a business in the design/architecture space.
While Plantkind's primary work is in collaboration with clients and homeowners, whose landscapes we love to bring to life, there lots of things which grow out of those projects. A multitude of ideas that we've learned amongst the plants and by building spaces, plus with more still to dig into together in this new format. Really appreciate you being here!
Upcoming Posts, Sneak Peek
Over the winter, I've consolidated all my notes and came up with around 36x ideas for newsletters that I'd like to get out of my system, and into the ecosystem of the internet.
Some of them even have clickbait internet-y titles, I mean, my very subtle version of that. They range from informational guides to thoughts on the natural world. Here's sneak peak at some drafts in-progress at the moment that might be coming your way:
Lacking Color Theory for Planting Palettes, Until Now
Outdoor Furniture Guide, Not Your Grandparents Patio Set
Kids Don't Need Lawns
Tech Stack for Running a Landscape Design Studio
You Can Just Plant Things
I’ve been here on Substack for some time now, scheming of finally starting this project. There's a great design community here already and some of our favorite newsletters to read have been For Scale, Garto, Personal Space, Nobody's Home, Mulch Pile, garden3d, hausekeeping, and many others.
What to Call This Place
As of now, ‘Growing Conditions‘ is the working title of the newsletter. It's what I've been calling it internally for the past year as I was getting ready to start publishing online again. Since the studio name is plant focused, I'm hoping to suggest a more robust and expansive set of ideas. Here's some other contenders that were in the works, but if you have any preferences or new ideas, it’d be fun to hear!
Natural Features
Surface Properties
Exterior Studies
Site Specific
And of course having studied typography before, it’s gotta look / feel right in terms of the letter forms come together. Other words that are somewhere in the sphere of being architectural and earthy that I'm drawn to include — Composites, Assembly, Footprint, Dimensions, Render, Background, Varieties, and Topographic.
Wait, What's Plantkind Again?
It's kinda tricky to know how familiar you might be, so just to make sure we got everything covered, here's a little bit of background.
Plantkind is an outdoor spatial design company. We design landscapes that are site specific and deepen your relationship with the natural world, while utilizing an open creative process and design system.
Our work is the intersection of native plant palettes and modern built environments for people to gather. This practice of gardening intends to create a more equitable world that honors and provides sustainable ecosystems for all life.
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Why You’re Getting This Newsletter
You could be receiving this newsletter for a variety of reasons. Maybe you joined before on Plantkind's website, through Shopify when we were selling plants online, signed up through Instagram Stories, reached out about a project together, we've crossed paths IRL recently, or have an upcoming hang on the calendar.
This Newsletter
You can view the Archive of past newsletters here on Substack website. The newsletter is offered without any type of paywall for the foreseeable future. If you know of someone who might be into the topics we're exploring, would love for you to share this newsletter with them.
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Unsubscribe
Please feel free to unsubscribe at any point, and know that there's no hard feelings. We know the vast amount of newsletters today can be overwhelming and clog up inboxes, and that’s not the intent of course. Probably better to be out in the garden anyway.
I’m so excited for you, Lily!! Cheers to new seasons and I can’t wait to continue to follow your beautiful journey. 💚🌿