BLOOM WHERE YOU'RE PLANTED

Flowers, flowers everywhere. Learn from one gardener's landscape to create your own backyard cutting garden.

- JULIE CHAI

"If you want to know the real me, you have to meet me in my garden," says Hala Kurdi Cozadd. And it's easy to understand why: Her plot is a living scrapbook of her life, filled with flowers and other plants reflecting the people and places that mean the most to her.

The daughter of diplomats, Hala was born in Jordan. During her younger years, her family moved to Germany; Saudi Arabia; Washington, D.C.; and California's Bay Area, where she now lives with her husband, Bruce, and their blended family. As a child, Hala was given basil seeds, which she planted. When the plants flourished, her identity as a gardener took root. As she and her family moved, she started a new garden in each location, and plants were her constant companions. "My plants are my home," she says.

"Other than my family, they were the only stable thing in my life." Originally created by Homestead Design Collective and more recently updated by Leslie Bennett's Pine House Edible Gardens firm-Hala's Bay Area garden today features fragrant citrus trees and herbs that remind Hala of Jordan, and blossom-covered cherry trees and tulips that recall D.C. It's also full of bush lilies like those that bloomed on her high school grounds, aromatic olives that scented her college campus, and begonias like her grandma grew.