Sarla DeGeorge has always been drawn to the beauty of garden plants and garden designs.

Throughout her youth, she frequently accompanied her mother, an avid gardener and artist, on field trips to arboretums, grand estates, formal gardens, and private garden tours around New England. The pair would keep journals of what they saw along the way, taking notes, sketching flowers and leaves, and pressing flower samples between the pages to reference later.

Sarla went on to study art at the Oregon College of Art and Craft in Portland, Oregon. Though her love and appreciation for the beauty of plants and gardening never strayed too far away. 

After college, Sarla headed to Big Sky, Montana, in the northern Rockies to enjoy life in a ski town. She took the position of ‘head gardener’ and managed several estates for a well-established landscaping company during the summers. 

Subsequently, she spent about a decade working as a studio potter, painter, and art teacher, making it her primary career. In the summers during that time, she continued to care for several gardens as a supplement to her work as an artist.

In 2005, at the age of 30, Sarla decided to change her primary career as a studio artist and teacher, returning to school to become a formally trained Landscape Designer.

Sarla gained her certificate of Landscape Design from the California School of Garden Design while living in Santa Cruz, CA.

In 2009, Sarla received her Permaculture Design Certificate (PDC) from the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center (OAEC) in Occidental, California. OAEC is considered one of the most reputable learning centers of its kind in the United States.

Sarla has been back in New England now for over a decade and has settled into the beautiful mountain town of Stowe, Vermont.

As a coastal New England native, Sarla is quite familiar with the plants that grow in this region. Additionally, Sarla has resided and traveled extensively to many more botanically diverse regions of the world, observing, taking notes, pressing, painting, and sketching the flora and fauna wherever she goes.

The varying green tones and textures of exotic specimen conifers in the Pacific Northwest, the bold tropical leaf forms of Coastal California and Hawaii, and the bright colors of the Latin American jungles—all of these have had a tremendous impact on her design aesthetic and how she incorporates plants into her designs.

Sarla brings years of training and practical experience, along with her artistic eye, to create refreshing contemporary gardens that blend beautifully with the traditional cottage garden design style and plant palette of New England.