Mary Jane Pearson Baker

"...You just must start gardening,
make mistakes, have successes,
and then garden some more."

Mary Jane Pearson Baker is owner and designer at Spring Branch Landscapes. She began gardening as a child with her father in the Mississippi Delta. Spring Branch began in 1985 when Mary Jane decided not to finish her doctorate in Anthropology and left the Ph.D program at UNC. She took some time to decide what she wanted to do. "I thought about all the parts of me that I would like to use and all the things that I had never done. I realized that I wanted to do something creative but real. I wanted to be my own boss. I wanted to work with living things – and I wanted to work outside." After receiving a degree in Landscape Gardening from Sandhills Community College she interned at the North Carolina Botanical Garden and took design courses at NC State University. She has been designing and installing gardens ever since. "I love the process: meeting a new client, seeing the potential in a site, helping a client create a vision of what is possible, and then making that vision a reality. One of the things that I find most satisfying and maddening about the profession is that you can not learn everything you need from a book. You just must start gardening, make mistakes, have successes, and then garden some more."