The Gardener

Some people find their calling, but Renèe grew into hers. In the soil of the Virginia countryside, in the disciplined quiet of historic estates, and in the particular satisfaction of a pruning cut made exactly right, her story grew right alongside the plants she was tending. Twenty years later, that relationship hasn't changed. What has changed is its scope.

She is, by trade and temperament, an estate gardener. Not a landscaper, not a generalist, but someone who has spent twenty years learning what gardens actually need, and how to give it to them. Whatever your garden is, she has seen something like it before.

Renèe's career was shaped by a lineage of exceptional places. She began as an apprentice with The Hunt Country Gardeners, where she was taught the art of formal pruning and gained access to some of the most demanding private gardens in the region — including The Ashby Inn in Paris, Virginia, where she maintained the Inn's formal gardens and cultivated a farm-to-table kitchen operation, and learned what it means to make a garden perform on a stage where every detail is noticed. That groundwork led to Oak Spring Garden Foundation, where she was recruited to steward Bunny Mellon's legendary estate — spending three years managing greenhouse cultivation and working in the tradition of historic landscape preservation.

Her work has since taken her from Rich Bottom Farm, a National Register property in Purcellville where she maintained historic gardens for seven years, to Kinloch Estate in The Plains, Virginia, where she kept a family of eight fed through a pandemic with microgreens and a seasonal vegetable garden, to the affluent residential neighborhoods of Athens, Greece — a city that takes its gardens seriously — each place leaving its mark on how she tends a garden.

Pruning is her signature. It is a skill that most gardeners claim and few truly possess, the ability to read a plant's architecture, understand its seasonal rhythms, and make cuts that serve both its health and its beauty. Renèe brings that eye to ornamentals, fruit trees, roses, boxwoods, hydrangeas, vines, and canes. It is slow, careful, irreversible work, and she treats it accordingly.

She consults with clients worldwide, helping them plan, problem-solve, and tend their gardens with the kind of expertise that doesn't require her to be standing in your garden to be useful. And when she is, the garden always knows it.