Some gardens are designed, others are lived in. The difference isn’t always visible at first — but you feel it the moment you step inside. In this issue of Alcove, we step inside the cozy garden shaped by memory, routine, and return — a space that reflects not just how someone gardens, but how they live.
Every garden tells a story — even if you don’t realize it yet. It’s the story of the people who’ve walked your path, the moments that shaped you, and the quiet dreams that still live somewhere between the rosemary and the stepping stones.
Designer Diane Samways of Diane Samways Garden Design believes those stories deserve to grow right alongside the plants. She’s not interested in perfect symmetry or show-stopping blooms. Her gardens are the kind that feel lived in — the kind that catch your breath on an ordinary Tuesday because something about them just feels like home.
“These stories aren’t just anecdotes, they’re emotional essences — magic, freedom, joy”
Some Gardens Are Built
from blueprints. Others, from memories. Maybe it’s your grandmother’s roses, the shade of a childhood tree, or that courtyard on a trip that you still think about every spring. For Diane, those aren’t just sentimental details — they’re design cues. Each one becomes a thread in a story that blends emotion and aesthetic grace.
Many of the women Diane works with are in seasons of change — an empty nest, a new start, a little reinvention. To help them see the connection between their life and their garden, she uses the rhythm of the seasons as a guide. Winter invites reflection. Spring sets intention. Summer celebrates growth. And autumn, as always, reminds us to let go.
It’s a simple, steady framework that teaches us a garden isn’t just something we build; it’s something we grow with. “These stories aren’t just anecdotes,” she says. “They’re emotional essences — magic, freedom, joy. That’s what I weave into a garden.”
And maybe that’s the part we’ve been missing all along: our gardens don’t just need plants. They need a little of us in them, too.
In a World Obsessed
with overnight transformations, Diane believes the best gardens are the ones that take their time. You can’t rush a space into feeling right—it has to unfold.
She encourages her clients to live with their gardens through every season: to notice how winter light softens edges, how spring’s damp soil smells just before the first bloom, how autumn breezes turn ordinary leaves into music. Those details, she says, reveal what a space truly wants to be. “You can’t design from a Pinterest board,” Diane says. “You have to stand in it. Feel how the light moves, how the air shifts, what’s already waiting to be discovered.”
The reward for patience is something deeper than beauty. A slow garden gathers texture and meaning year by year. It stops being a project and starts feeling like a relationship—one that matures quietly, becoming more generous and grounded with time.
Asked about Small Garden,
Diane described them as places that demand both creativity and courage. “Every corner matters, every inch counts,” she said. “A small garden naturally invites us to be bold and intentional.”
But that’s only part of what unfolds here.
The way the space is divided, where it opens, where it holds you —
the choices that turn it from a garden into somewhere you return to —
become clearer as you move further into it.
Where a Garden Begins to Suggest Something More
In story-led gardens, not everything is revealed at once. There are moments that invite you forward — hints of something just beyond view, shaped as much by feeling as by design.
Some gardens do this not by showing everthing, but by keeping something just out of reach.
Photo by: Barnabas Piper
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A garden reveals itself slowly is often one you will return to over time.
Continue the story inside
Alcove Issue No. 01 — The Cozy Garden
Inside this issue
Read the full story inside the issue →
Includes two additional gardens and design insights
