Hi, I'm Anna.
My husband and I spent two years traveling across the United States in an RV before choosing a one-acre woodland property near Raleigh. We wanted the quiet of living among mature trees - not a cleared suburban yard.
But I am also a designer. I wanted flowers, structure, bouquets for the house, and year-round beauty without losing the character of the woods.
That tension became BloomMap: a designer’s eye learning to create an ornamental garden inside dry shade, mature roots, uneven light, clay, and sand.
I help homeowners with wooded, shady yards make sense of one difficult space - what belongs, where it goes, and what to do next.
See how Garden Studio worksKeep the woods. Build the garden.
Beauty begins with accepting the site.
Most garden inspiration assumes open sun and easy soil. My property gave me dry shade, mature roots, uneven light, clay and sandy soil, and very few simple planting sites. I began learning how to create ornamental beauty inside the conditions we had deliberately chosen.
I have learned that “shade tolerant” is not the same as successful beneath mature trees. A plant may survive and still grow leggy, stop flowering, or never contribute to the composition around it. Good design starts by reading the site honestly, then choosing plants that can genuinely belong there.
I document the failures as carefully as the successes - a shrub pushed into too little sun, a rose that never had enough light, a patch of grass I finally stopped reseeding. Each correction teaches me how to work with the garden instead of forcing a garden onto it.
I first built the BloomMap app because I needed a better way to map and track those experiments. Garden Studio is the next step: helping other homeowners make clearer decisions in difficult ornamental spaces of their own.
I believe a garden can respect its site and still feel composed, ornamental, and deeply beautiful.
The garden behind everything
This garden is young. We bought the house in mid-2024, and I put the first plants in the ground in February 2025. BloomMap combines plans drawn from this garden with active experiments, concept studies, and regionally researched combinations. I label the difference because honest observation is more useful than pretending every first choice works.
The 200-ft privacy screen
A mixed-shrub screen planted along the property line - 200 feet of it.
The side-yard shade garden
One continuous flower bed running the shady side of the house.
A designer’s eye, tested in a real garden
My product-design background trained me to take a complicated problem, identify the real constraints, and turn it into a clear system someone can actually use.
I bring that same process to garden beds: diagnose the conditions first, then compose structure, repetition, mature scale, seasonal sequence, and a direction that is practical to implement.
If you're curious about the design side of my work, my portfolio lives at daab.cc.
What I do
See how the decisions come together.
In the Holly path bed, a strip of failing lawn became a planting plan shaped by dry shade, mature roots, changing soil, and the way the garden is approached.
Five species, seventeen plants, and one difficult bed.
Read the complete projectGarden Studio
Bring me one difficult space.
Start with the garden area you keep postponing. We’ll work out what belongs, what needs to change, and what to do next.
60-minute virtual session · $125
Work with me