Not-So-Secret-Garden

Not-So-Secret-Garden

Out in her half-acre garden, Monica Brandies stoops down, orange scissors in hand, and snips a few leaves of Dawn Dewa spinach.

"I'm collecting salad here as I go," she says, dropping the cuttings into a colander. "Don't mind me."

Along the way she adds okra, basil and hibiscus petals. She could probably walk her garden blindfolded and come back inside with the proper ingredients for a complete meal. Monica may have started gardening to feed her family, but now she also looks to her hobby-turned-career as a means for exercise and therapy, a way to stay "as sane as can be."

The first garden she ever had was a victory garden during World War II. "That really ages me," she says, laughing. "I remember we planted peanuts. I don't think we managed to grow much food, but we tried."

In college, a love of the land and its innate potential led her to study horticulture and landscape design. Today the renowned plant expert and author tends to a "jungle" that is brimming with enough plant varieties to fill a book"well, 11 books to be exact, most on the topic of Florida gardening. A farm girl at heart (Monica has owned several farms and says that if she were an animal, she would be a cow), she moved from Iowa to Brandon in 1987 with her husband, David. At first, their new yard consisted of nothing but sand and a pool. "He was so thrilled to be here and I was so lost," she says. "I couldn't even grow anything." She had already published her first book on gardening, and this challenge prompted her second one, "Florida Gardening: The Newcomer's Survival Manual."

"I had to learn a whole new way," she says. "It's easier to grow things, but you can't do it like you did it up north. A lot of people give up before they figure it out, but I wasn't going to."

Ten books and countless public speaking engagements later, Monica is a local go-to source for all-things gardening. She even has a weekly column in the Brandon News.

Her No. 1 most important rule when it comes to gardening?

"Enjoy it," Monica says. "That's your little bit of the world, and it's the only thing you can control."
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