Dandelion Gardening Arts

Welcome to Dandelion Gardening Arts, a passionate team of nature lovers, botanists, and artists dedicated to creating and maintaining beautiful gardens. Our team, led by Leslie Watkins, Lawrence Davis-Hollander, and Rachel Perry, is attentive, reliable, and very creative. We cater to a wide range of garden styles, from cottage to formal, secret to public, native to sacred.

Leslie Watkins, a Connecticut Master Gardener, is not only a talented gardener but also a fine artist. Her garden design illustrations have been published in Rodale's "Perennial Combinations" and in magazines including Fine Gardening, Horticulture, Kitchen Gardener, and in The New York Times. She is also a landscape oil painter, botanical illustrator, and instructor of watercolor classes and papercrafting workshops.

Lawrence Davis-Hollander, the founding Director of the Eastern Native Seed Conservancy, is an expert in preserving and promoting heirloom vegetable varieties. He trained as a botanist with a sub-specialty in ornamental plants and art history at Connecticut College. He has farmed organic vegetables in New York State and studied economic and ethnobotany with Richard Evans Schultes, one of the world's foremost botanists specializing in medicinal plant uses.

Rachel Perry, a Connecticut Master Gardener, is a passionate advocate for all things nature. She is our "Go-to" person for just about everything and is in training to become a Plant Whisperer. She does it all, from designing gardens to maintaining them.

Our Services

At Dandelion Gardening Arts, we offer a variety of services to help you grow the garden of your dreams. We can help you create perennial beds and borders, plan and plant kitchen gardens, and maintain them over time. If you have a garden that has become overgrown and out of control, we can renovate it into an attractive, manageable garden that you can take pleasure in.

Our routine garden maintenance includes planting, deadheading, pruning, weeding, edging, division, and mulching. We can provide you with illustrations and diagrams to help you visualize the plan before we begin. We can also help you set up a customized kitchen garden to suit your "taste", complete with a four-year vegetable rotation schedule to help you know what, where, and when to plant.

Our Gardens

We have had the pleasure of working on numerous beautiful gardens, including Ashgrove Garden, Dandelion Cottage, Emerson House, Meadow House, Norfolk Library, Persian Garden, Playhouse, South Norfolk, and Summer Retreat. Each garden presents its unique challenges and opportunities, and we enjoy the process of transforming them into stunning outdoor spaces.

Contact Us

We would love to hear from you! Whether you are looking for a consultation to get started on your new garden or need some advice on maintaining your existing garden, please don't hesitate to reach out. You can sign up for our newsletter to stay up to date on our latest projects, services, and tips. We look forward to helping you create your dream garden.