LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE AND GARDEN DESIGN IN FLORIDA
Without realizing it, my love for gardens, landscapes and plants began in my childhood while growing up on a small Polish country farm. Here, surrounded by woods, fields, grazing lands, ponds, springs, centuries old trees, ancient orchards, vegetable gardens and granny’s flowers, I started to meet with and to know nature in the simplest and best way possible – just playing and living it daily.
I learned the beauty of a garden in every season. From the first flowers in the spring, through the opulence of summertime and the exaggerated fall colors, to the winter-naked majestic oaks in front of the house, there was always an incredible beauty in the outdoor world.
Then I moved to Italy and my wild nature brought from North Europe I blended into landscapes of the Mediterranean South – colorful, joyful, variegated, elegant, rich and saturated with history in every square meter.
Meanwhile I travelled and in every country I visited, there was always some other landscape, plant, flower or garden worth being discovered and loved. One of places that made me always speechless was indeed Florida for its manicured front-yards, tidy lawns, lush omnipresent vegetation, bright colors and curved coco palms. With my son sleeping in his child’s seat, I spent hundreds of hours hanging around villas looking at gardens with their exotic plants.
In the end I decided that it was time to do something with all this love of landscapes and gardens. I started studying Landscape Architecture at “La Sapienza” University in Rome and with all the enthusiasm I had, I did not stop until I had taken a master’s degree. Meanwhile, working on my thesis, I met a fantastic and passionate landscape architect in Florida. We liked each other and after days and sleepless nights I decided to accept her offer of working together.
I crossed the ocean and I’m here, with my cultural luggage full of landscapes and gardens, with all my northernmost European woods, vegetable gardens and orchards, Italian historical landscapes and renaissance gardens, French parterre gardens and anything else that can be related to the word “garden”.
This web-site is intended to collect and put in order all that has to do with landscapes and translate them into ideas for gardens that reflect not only my love for landscape architecture but to follow what is the essence of this country – the blend and distillation of the heritage of tens of cultures from the whole world.
Gabriela Fojt