By the time the redbud blooms, you’ll know every corner of the yard by heart.

My first garden was a strip of Piedmont red clay behind a rented house, and I killed most of what I put in it. I planted what looked good at the nursery, not what wanted to live there. By the second summer I’d learned to read the soil, the afternoon sun and the way water ran off the slope, and I started sketching the yard before I bought a single plant.

Friends noticed. Then neighbors asked. I kept drawing on tracing paper at the kitchen table until it made sense to rent a studio on Pee Dee Avenue, where the drawings could spread out across the floor.

Today I do the part of landscaping that happens before anyone digs: the planting plan, the hardscape layout, the 3D render that lets you stand in the finished garden. I don’t install. That keeps me honest, because the only thing I have to sell you is a drawing that works.