A life divided can be a source of anxiety, particularly in an individual that likes to get things right. I have dual passions and have learned to live with, both rather than give up on one or the other.

As a child, I was going to be an artist, college studies concentrated on drawing and oil painting; that was my passion. To pay rent, I worked full time at a nursery, the cashier who also answered the phone. Eventually, I was promoted to maintaining the tropical greenhouses where I found happiness and a job I loved. The inkling was there; my childhood window sills were filled with plants; my mother was the enabler as we visited nurseries and ordered plants from the back of cereal boxes.

Art was left behind as I pursued the plant world. With marriage came ten acres of land, and I left my job when my first child was born. A stay at home, mom, meant having a nursery, a plant nursery; this was a passion that I did not want to lose. Twenty-five years later, I closed the nursery and reinvented myself as an estate gardener, with a little stint as a photographer. I joined a gallery to sell my photographs; then another gallery, spending days split between gardening and photography.

A pivotal email changed everything, a request from Virginia Tech to speak at a symposium. The event was titled "The Wicked Plant Symposium" and I would be lecturing with Amy Stewart, the author of "The Wicked Plants" and "The Wicked Bugs", as well as Paula Gross, the co-author of "Bizarre Botanicals". Me, an unauthored presenter, was asked for a lecture title - "The Dark Side" came to mind and sealed the deal.

From that day until the lecture, I was on fire. Terrariums with skulls, doll baby heads turned into planters, I even experimented with leaves sewn together Frankenstein style. The lecture was a huge success, but I didn't realize (at first) that it had opened a long-forgotten door. The childhood love of horror movies, Halloween dress-up, and making miniature villages for pet slugs (!) weren't lost, just forgotten.

Some months later, I saw a photograph of art online and felt so strongly about it that I traveled to New Orleans to meet the artist. That was eleven years ago, and my first introduction to assemblage art.

Today I am still an estate gardener but also a part-owner and manager of an art gallery in Occoquan, Virginia. I am an assemblage artist, which is sometimes called 3D collage. Unlike other artists that create assemblage, I put things together and then paint them to look like one piece (not many small bits). Each creation is time-consuming; you have to think like an engineer as various components need to become one, secure in their attachment, but cohesive visually. The final layers of paint are as involved as a canvas painting but over a 3D surface. My mind is free to explore themes, and each year I pick one and work for the twelve months before the present a body of work with that concept.

It's been a remarkable journey, and I spent a couple of years thinking that one passion was enough and one had to go. I even built a visual art journal to work through the dilemma. The best advice I was ever given "Just Chill".