This Artist's Blooming Garden Inspires Her Work | Garden Tour

Welcome to my garden. Come on out. I want to show you some of my plants. I am totally into more is more when it comes to flowers. I love raising dahlias from seed, beautiful things like this color added dahlia from Florette. Every year I start about eight plants and build this giant mound of dahlia goodness. Things like this beautiful red one right here. And I love how large and exuberant. For me gardening is like creating a wild bouquet and it's kind of on the verge of out of control as well as in control. And that's like the creative process of making artwork. I love the layering of the flowers. So when you walk your walk through here and your eye goes into the beautiful layers of everything and how they start to tumble in the fall and they become like these gems that will end in the end of the season. I live in Minnesota and we have winters here. So these flowers are precious things to me because they are the models for the artwork that I make. Everything that I create out of paper is made from these beautiful flowers that I start from seed in February. And so by the end of the season I've got gorgeous models to work with in my paper botanicals. You can see the layering, the tumbling, the sheer size of some of these zinnias is amazing. I love how they're like a painting. I'm painting really with real life objects. I love that they're large and they have all these different colors. This is one of my particular favorites here is this zinnia and I have made it out of paper. It's just a gorgeous huge variety. And probably one of my favorite things about gardening is feeding all the insects and how important it is to feed the pollinators. And that's been an unexpected joy of gardening where like there's days in the afternoon when the sun is shining and there's butterflies dancing way up in the air and it's just a pleasure to see. I grew up on a farm in Iowa where we did some gardening and it was all about growing things on our farm. And it kind of came to me later in life probably when I was about 30. I tried growing one of everything. I had a rooftop garden and at that time I loved trying everything that was new. It just grew into a passion and when we bought this house I stood in that porch and looked out here and thought this garden is going to change me. My life will change as this grows. None of this was here and boy has it changed my life. Gardening has made my life richer. It's connected me with people all over the world. That intuition was right that this was the place for us. 20 years ago we bought it with nothing here and then I grew it into this. Thanks for watching. Go to homeworthy.com for exclusive content and shopping guides.