Room to Grow

For an Arkansas gardener, what started out as a simple shed turns into a well-appointed backyard retreat.

- written by JENNIFER KOPF

You could say Traci Burges grew up with her hands in the dirt. As a child in the small town of Mountain Home, Arkansas, she spent her days swapping plant cuttings and roaming the gardens of both sets of her great-grandparents. “I always thought their gardens were such magical places,” she says. Those experiences, combined with a later introduction to English gardens, laid fertile ground for a budding hobby. In 2023, after some unfortunate storm damage, Traci had the opportunity to rethink her backyard. She told her husband, Steve, about her desire for a simple structure to store her clay pots and overwinter her ferns. Steve, a former home builder, was happy to oblige, and once he snagged a trio of large windows for next to nothing at a local auction, the simple “shed” soon took on a life of its own, with new ide