My fascination with gardens started as a pre-teen and has never diminished. In the California I grew up in, you couldn’t talk about gardening without also talking about “outdoor living.” It’s a vague term, but I knew it included fun in a treehouse, cooking and eating outdoors, and building things like decks and bird feeders. Best of all, it meant not having to go inside. Seven years of working at a retail nursery in my hometown of Napa, combined with English studies at U. C. Berkeley, resulted in a lifetime of writing, painting, and designing gardens and exploring outdoor living – eighteen books on gardening, eight cookbooks primarily on outdoor-cooking, and countless “gardenesque” paintings. You could say I grew where I was planted. It’s a good place to be.

A. Cort Sinnes