Our Origin Story

Sun and Moon began as a backyard garden at our family home just outside of Austin, Texas.  

The garden started as an excuse to get more fresh flowers into the house.  I have always loved fresh flowers. Yep, I’m that girl that has flowers delivered to herself from time to time. I love having them around to appreciate, stopping from time to time to cradle them, breathe them in.  Like works of art, they inspire me, Nature’s transcendent creations.

“I must have flowers, always, and always.”

Claude Monet (and I agree!)

We named the fledgling garden the Sun and Moon Garden.  The kids picked out the name, and it.was.perfect.  The “Moon” captured my nighttime planting sessions when, eager to get my new bare root roses in the ground before spring, I would come out to the garden at dark, after my day job was done and the kids were in bed, and tuck the bare roots into the lovingly mixed soil under a blanket of mulch.  The “Sun” captured the sunny afternoons when the kids poked sunflower seeds into their own garden beds and then daily after school ran excitedly out to the garden to see how quickly those tall cheerful stalks were growing so fast you could almost see them stretch toward the sun (sidenote: how can you NOT believe in magic when you see this?).  Sun and Moon; Day and Night; Rose and Sunflower.  Time would tell how perfect the name truly was, as the garden grew into a business focused on Nature’s rhythms, Earth’s rotations, driven and influenced by those celestial bodies.

There were some vegetables, too.  The tomatoes were exultant that first year – so many it was impossible to keep up with, and passing through the garden I’d pop them off the vine and eat them immediately, like bite-sized bursts of summer.  My toddler nephew loved to do that too – so much that we nicknamed him Johnny Tomato that summer.  I would cut off the tomato stems with their delicate yellow flowers and iconic tomato leaf scent and mix them in with my cut flower bouquets – always a flower lover, first.  Over time the garden grew, with new varieties like chamomile, gladiolus, asparagus, and yarrow joining the roses, sunflowers, lavender and tomatoes.  People would comment on my green thumb, not realizing that 80% of what I tried had actually failed.  But that 20% that DID work was inspirational, and drove me further forward. In the summer, I would garden in the early evening, after the blazing Texas sun relented slightly, and the native evening primrose surrounding the garden would open just as I would walk out of the garden on my way back to the house, somehow always taking me by surprise as they seemed to burst out of nothingness all at once.

The garden grew, and so did an idea.  There was an over-abundance of flowers in the growing months, more than enough to support the hearty ecosystem of birds, bees, and other insects that the garden now hosted, and it seemed a pity to waste them.  I began making bouquets for friends and family, teachers, and party hosts.  [“Flowers are your super power” my husband, Stephen, said, and I loved that image of a flower-fueled Hero spreading beauty and happiness.]  I started drying rose petals and stems, experimenting with steam distillation to make rose water and herb oils, soaking rose hips in argan oil for skin treatments, popping chamomile buds off of their stems to steep in tea and hot baths.  I harvested and collected, dried and preserved, without really having any idea what I would do with it all.  Most of the time the house was filled with a melange of petals drying on racks wherever there was a free countertop; celosia stems drying upside down in closets; roses lined up on the kitchen bar with notecards comparing vase life of different varieties and under different conditions; assorted clippings that I had happened upon in the yard and brought in from the garden with no purpose other than that they inspired me.  The garage fridge was stuffed with flowers chilling post-harvest amidst the beverage cans and leftovers.

I began to source and explore different types of oils and fragrances.  The candles came next, and that began an entirely new phase of experimentation, testing, and learning.  I called it “candle science” I now had an endless stream of half burned candles to add to the mix, testing dozens of fragrance combinations, measuring burn times, experimenting with different vessels and botanical additions.  Some things worked and a lot didn’t.  I plugged away like a mad scientist without a clear purpose, inspired by the transcendental beauty and magic of what nature had provided in our little garden, and an urge to bring this experience more fully into our home.  

“Bliss is the welling up of the transcendent energy within you.”

Joseph Campbell

I’ll tell you a secret.  I don’t love to garden, not exactly.  Gardening disrupts my fixed mindset and challenges my life-learned perfectionism and relentless drive to organize and control my environment (hello:  Enneagram 1, a/k/a the “perfectionist” or “reformer”!).  It makes me change my plans.  It disappoints me.  It requires me to work disproportionately to earn the fleeting moments of bliss I get from the perfectly imperfect posy of fragrant garden roses that rest on my bedside table, soon afterwards wilting and dropping their petals.  It forces me to be curious, to let go, to accept what is, and to adapt to a plan much greater and more elegant than my own.  It forces me – ha! of course! – to grow.  

“Work is love made visible. Work can be part of our calling, part of search for meaning, why we exist.”

Khalil Gibran

Eventually, amidst the chaos came clarity.  It revealed itself slowly, quietly, and then all of a sudden it appeared, much like the evening primrose that seemed to bloom out of nothingness, although of course it had always been there.  What I had been striving for was connection.  Connection based on what nature had chosen to provide me with in return for my consistency and hard work.  The connection to our true selves, to our Higher Power, that can only come when we stop trying to change things and take a moment to just be.  Connection to and celebration of the moment that we are in right now.  I wanted to create a sensory experience in harmony with the rhythms of Nature rather than with what is arbitrarily on trend, on sale, on mass-produced display.  Intentional connection, not distraction.  Being fully in the flow of the moment, in the now, is our path to that connection.  

And so Sun and Moon Garden Botanicals was born.

Sun and Moon is about creating space for those moments of connection.  Our seasonal products are carefully crafted to create a harmonious sensory experience – smell, appearance, sound, feel – that is in sync with what is happening in Nature.  It is my hope that in these moments, you will more fully connect to yourselves, your surroundings and loved ones, to our Earth, Sun and Moon, to what is . . . and to your bliss.

The Sun and Moon Garden