Colletti - Living decor: plants, potting and DIY projects: botanical styling with fiddle-leaf figs, monsteras, air plants, succulents, ferns, and more of your favorite houseplants

Elements of a crafters desk include the fruits of creative projects.

New York Botanical Garden is a place I had only dreamed Id be able to work someday. So, when I started right out of horticulture school in a summer gardening program, I was thrilled it was really happening. I later returned to work for NYBG at a small, precious gem of a plant shop in the IBM atrium on Madison Avenue. We would create displays in the windows and spend our days replacing trays of plants and cacti from the downstairs stockroom. Those days were fun and I was learning the plant shop business. In 2003, I continued my schooling at NYBG, chiseling my green skills as shop manager of the Shop in the Garden. The shop included books, ceramics, wonderful garden supplies, gorgeous pillows, and custom-designed fern dinnerware. When my first book, Terrariums: Gardens under Glass, was published, I had the honor of being interviewed by a wonderful reporter for Edible Manhattan, who crowned me the terrarium savant.

I learned so much working as a garden retailer in a place that educates daily on what it means to love plants. We bought, sold, displayed, and cared for our plant inventory. We watched the garden evolve throughout the seasons, which was, on many days, just breathtaking: the white Korean dogwood trees at the entrance of the rose garden, or the perennial garden outside the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory in summer. My gratitude is massive. How lucky am I? I intended never to waste this privilege but instead utilize it to the best of my abilities. This is how I discovered my garden lifestyle and brought all the elements together.

I spent thirteen years at the NYBG shop creating displays with plants and other merchandise to produce endless visual scenes to entice our plant-loving shoppers and thousands of tourists per year. Every year, a new theme arose from the cycle of plant exhibits created in the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory. The gardens of artists were recreated under the giant glass dome, including the wildly successful Frida Kahlo garden exhibit, the inspired Emily Dickinson herbarium collection, and a replica of the moon gate of the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Garden in Seal Harbor, Maine. Did you know that Monet chose all those water lilies himself in his paintings? Each exhibit was different, and each time I learned something new about plants from the gardens and lives of each extraordinary artist.