As a commercial real estate lawyer practicing in the hospitality industry, Cathleen saw the inside of an office way more than she saw the inside of a garden. She had learned how to grow food and flowers from her mother but spent years cooped up in her office, dreaming of outdoor spaces both beautiful and beneficial, productive and purposeful.
It wasn’t until the pandemic derailed her family’s plans that she turned her gardening dreams into a full-fledged business. Now, "The Dirt Queen" reigns over her own urban kitchen garden and helps others design and build beautiful kitchen gardens throughout Atlanta.
Cathleen hit all the stops on her journey to becoming a garden coach. First, she became a certified landscape designer in 2018. Then, a Georgia master gardener in 2019. She had just joined a local nursery as a landscape designer when COVID-19 shut everything down and brought her husband’s career in the entertainment industry to a halt.
Cathleen and her husband used their downtime to sketch, plan, and finally build their own raised bed garden. She read Kitchen Garden Revival in a day, devoured all the modules and lessons in Gardenary, and completed the Kitchen Garden Academy, before going on to become a certified garden consultant. After years of dreaming and drawing sketches, she became the founder of her very own gardening design business: Kitchenairy Gardens.
Lot’s of playing in the dirt. That’s how my garden came to life. And that’s how Kitchenairy Gardens was created.
Kitchenairy Gardens designs, installs, and maintains urban kitchen gardens with the mission of helping people eat local and seasonal, from right outside their door! Cathleen uses lessons learned during courses at The Culinary Institute of America to create garden-centered recipes that she shares with clients, and she dispenses garden wisdom in cleverly titled blog posts on her website.
I’ve learned how to plant, grow, and harvest everything from herbs to salad ingredients to vegetables to fruits and berries. And now, I also grow the cut flowers that adorn the center of our table. You can always find me in the kitchen or in the garden... designing, creating, planting, harvesting, cooking, arranging, perfecting... and eating!
I love sharing stories like Cathleen’s with this community. Similar to our other garden coaches, Cathleen envisioned the outdoor lifestyle she wanted to live, the garden-fresh food she wanted to eat, and worked to bring about positive change in her life, even during a difficult time. She made the garden an ordinary part of her life, and you can too!
Here’s to positive changes and wisdom gained while playing in dirt!
Connect with Cathleen and Kitchenairy Gardens
If you want to follow Cathleen's journey and become a garden coach too (even if you're just thinking about making a change), our 2021 Garden Coach Society class is now enrolling. Find all the training, mentorship, and peer support you need to set up, grow, and scale your Garden Consulting business in the Garden Coach Society. Enroll here.