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I started indoor gardening early in my adult life. Terrariums were popular at the time, and I loved creating miniature glass gardens. African violets spread from a windowsill in my home to a large lighted grow stand. I started selling terrariums and African violets to support my habit, to give me more room and a little money to buy more plants and supplies to create more terrariums and grow more African violets.
Although I started selling at craft shows and flea markets on weekends, my hobby soon grew into a business, and I opened Lillie's Lovely Gardens, a retail plant store. Customers wanted more than plants — they wanted plants they could grow, and they wanted advice on how to care for those plants.
I found myself repeating the same advice over and over again, and soon decided to provide the information in written form. Carolyn Horton, a talented artist and the owner of Artisans' Alley where my shop was located, created the artwork, and Lillie's Lovely LIttle Gardening Book came into being. I sold the book in my store for four years.
When the booming real estate market in San Antonio created a need for plants in commercial buildings, I closed the retail store to open Lillie's Plantscapes, an interior landscape company.
The company began as a one-person operation from my home, but business grew rapidly. When I hired my first employees, I personally trained each maintenance technician to care for plants. When the business grew too large for me to do the training personally, I developed a training program that was highly regarded in the industry. When I sold the company after nearly twenty years, we had 15 employees and over 300 customers.
After years of dealing with the complex care of exotic plants in commercial buildings, I forgot that the individual doesn't need a vast amount of complicated knowledge to enjoy indoor gardening. When I became an expert in interior landscaping at AskMe.com, I discovered that people are still asking the same questions my customers asked me a quarter century ago. Although many years have passed, the basic tips I wrote in Lillie's Lovely Little Gardening Book still apply for the person who wants to keep a few plants alive and healthy.
