CREATIVE CONVERSATIONS
Heather Crosby
Heather Crosby
is a graphic designer, recipe developer, consultant, and educator specializing in plant-based, gluten-free good food for all eaters.
She’s the founder of Good Food Cooking School and the author of the YumUniverse and Pantry to Plate Cookbooks. A lover of all things plants, she can likely be found barefoot in her garden when she’s not creating, cooking, designing, making, or baking.
Heather’s career began in Chicago as a graphic designer at agencies with corporate work-until-midnight cultures. Eventually, health issues catalyzed a necessary change in eating and lifestyle habits, and after a lifetime of significant veggie phobia and reliance on beige foods, she had to teach herself to cook more good food to feel better.
Using a lack of cooking know-how (silver lining: no rules to follow) and creativity, she started developing plant-based, gluten-free recipes that tasted like the comfort foods she grew up with (mac & cheese, ice cream, breads). In 2009, she started sharing these recipes online and hasn’t stopped since.
After 15 years in the city, a desire to be surrounded by nature led her back to her historic college town, on the Potomac River in West Virginia, where she continues to develop and share recipes and resources with Good Food Cooking School members.
This chapter has brought about an obsession with gardening her little plot of land and foraging the region around it—everything from berries to beans to mushrooms to dahlias as big as your head. She believes that there are countless lessons in the cycles of nature, and every season can teach us something new if we slow down and watch closely for a moment.
She’s a textbook Capricorn, equally in love with the infinite inspiration the city and small-town life provides, and she tries to balance time in both as much as possible.
Where you can find Heather
What are your earliest memories involving flowers?
My grandmother always had flowers around her, inside and outside of her home. She had violets growing in her yard within the grass and I was always fascinated with them… I’d often go out and pick her a “bouquet” of them and wrap them in these paper doilies that she had in a kitchen drawer.
What drives your creativity?
I’m inspired by everything—a curious Capricorn with a can-do attitude who wants to learn and share with others. If I want to do something, I figure out how to do it whether it’s building a deck myself or developing a recipe for gluten-free, dairy-free puff pastry. I’m a creative maker who tends to channel creative problem solving into whatever form I’m into at the time.
Professionally, it can be design (I love logos/branding), consulting, or creating Good Food Cooking School resources and recipes.
Personally, it can be learning about perennials and annuals, growing mushrooms, creating a layered cottage garden, or teaching myself how to play singing bowls. I’ve had a lot of lives. I’ve been a fire dancer, jewelry maker, designer of all kinds, cookbook author, cooking educator, who knows what other work I’ll put out into the world.
What were some of the major points along the trajectory of designing your garden?
My home is in the historic part of town with a small-but-unique plot of land including a tree-covered creek (with a little bridge!) in the backyard. I have different micro terrains on this land: a shade garden and a sunny area. Both allow me to have a kitchen garden, various perennials, and special trees. For example, I can have delicate Japanese maples by the water layered under the taller overstory, dahlias up front in the full sun of the cutting garden, and homegrown veg and beans in the food garden. I also have planters of edible flowers, and multiple herb gardens. I research often, saving what I want to try to a Pinterest board. I travel to various nurseries in my region during different seasons to see what is blooming and when. And I also use a plant identifying app to help me when I see something I like when I’m out and about.
My goal is to create colorful, textural interest in my garden that changes and becomes something new with each season. This is an ongoing process with no real end. For someone like me who is a forever learner, it’s ideal. Each year, I watch the plants evolve and I can see where I got a little overambitious with certain decisions, where I need to add some layers, or where the creatures that live in my yard like to hang out and snack. I learn about natural deterrents and methods to harmoniously minimize critter issues from local folks who know the land/area well. I’m building a relationship with the living things in my yard. I tend to them, and they in turn, tend to me. When I lived in the city, I had no clue that I had the capacity to feel this way about nature. It’s reciprocity at its best.
What role do flowers play in your life?
My all-time favorite movie is Harold & Maude. In it, Maude talks about how in a field of daisies, while they may look all alike to some folks, if you look closer, they are all individuals with discernible differences. I always appreciated this sentiment, but now as a gardener with over a decade of experience, I have a much richer understanding of it.
While the 20-year old “Chicago me” may find this statement hyperbolic, flowers have taught me how to slow down and be patient. When you put a tiny seed into the ground, or bury some potato-looking brown tubers, and have to wait months for them to grow 8’ tall, and then you realize that the potential for this gorgeous dinner-plate sized bloom was inside those unsightly tubers all along, I mean, the life lessons and metaphors are right there. And it’s marvelous. Nature is a teacher.
I have a cutting garden that I pack full of grasses, native perennials, dahlias, zinnias, and whatever other annuals I feel like planting that season. Going out every few days to cut and arrange a bouquet for myself or a friend is pure joy. When I’m struggling with a business or personal challenge, I can go out there and the tightness in my chest eases.
This is why I like to start my day by standing out there with a hot beverage to watch the pollinators. Honey bees are scarce these days, but when I see some, I know they’re likely from Lori’s hive up the street. Which is then turned into jars of honey sold at the local Farmers’ Market. Hummingbirds, butterflies of all kinds, the occasional dragonfly, wasps in all colors—I feel proud that I’ve made a place where they like to hang out. And there’s plenty for everyone.
On this note, I’ve also become the neighborhood “dahlia lady.” Adults and kids are welcome to come on in and cut their own flowers. It’s the simplest gesture, and one that makes all parties feel good.
How can people use flowers and nature to create more community?
Growing and sharing is a simple way to bring joy to someone’s day. If there are the means, a simple plot, above-ground planter, or shared garden space can be used to grow flowers for pollinators and people.
Think outside of the box—live flowers are great, but dried flowers and grasses are beautiful too. For example, when my miscanthus starts to pop its plumes in the fall, I dry them and give them to friends so they can have plant life in their houses throughout winter. You can dry dahlias and other flowers in silica. You can monetize these efforts or just use them as an opportunity to connect and share, in every season.
“Unapologetically
be yourself.”
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve been given that’s helped shape your work?
When I was just about to graduate from college, I went to see graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister give a talk. For some reason the invites to the talk were on whoopie cushions. I went up to him afterwards, whoopie cushion in hand, and asked him not for his autograph (that’s never really been my style), but to write his best advice for me on the back. He scribbled: “When something takes guts, always go for it.” That whoopie-cushion-scrawled advice helped me find the resolve I needed to sell my truck, pack up my kitties, and move halfway across the country for a 3-month part-time design gig, and no plan after that. Moving to Chicago was one of the greatest decisions I’ve ever made. It was the first domino in a series that has informed a life and career I’m proud of.
What’s been your biggest “a-ha moment” in working in flowers and design?
Watching this garden change with the seasons has made me appreciate all seasons, not just the growing ones.
What’s a non-negotiable for your creative workspace?
Good lighting. In the daytime, I need sunlight, brightness. At nighttime, it helps to have warm, moody, transition-to-sleep lighting.
What would you create with flowers if you had unlimited resources?
I dream of having an experiential flower farm, where folks can cut their own flowers, but also enjoy a meal created by me where every recipe incorporates flowers and plants in some form. Homemade wines, jams, jellies, desserts, soups, cocktails, fire-roasted goods, breads. I’d also get those frequency music makers that you can attach to plants and collaborate with musicians to make the music from the plants on the farm. It would have an adorable gift shop filled with botanical tinctures, beverages, edibles, ferments, home decor, seeds, tubers… the full immersive flower experience package. I already have the menus mapped out!
What advice would you share with others who are beginning to develop their creative styles and find their own way?
Unapologetically be yourself.
Handpicked
A few of Heather’s favorites…
Favorite flower
Dahlia
Favorite season
Spring and fall are a tie for me.
Current style inspiration
Ikebana, monochromatic flowers, and odd combos for indoors.
Favorite floral patterns
Odd, unusual, graphic, oversimplified patterns — the weirder the better.
Current color obsessions
Depend on the season—since it’s winter, lilac-greys, browns, burgundy, sage, & acid green.
Your last great read
I just finished The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson.
Hobbies & activities
I’m teaching myself how to play singing bowls so I can give soundbaths to friends/myself. Also, painting, being the World’s Best Auntie, yoga, hiking, runs along the river, natural dyeing with botanicals, record collecting, and recipe dev for dairy-free cheeses lately for a new course I’m making (I have some aged ones that are a few months old!).
Favorite botanical destinations
Chicago Botanic Garden.
The woods and trails around my home.
Any Japanese-inspired gardens because I want so much to have this restraint in my own garden design, but I gotta be honest with myself, I’m a maximalist on the garden front.
Thank you so much, Heather!
More of Heather’s current work
Bonus: the Superbloom community can use the code goodfoodnow for $50 off sign up!
Image credits: Heather Crosby & Marta Sasinowska
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