Create Your Own Garden Paradise with Landscape Designer Emily Kelting

It's time to think gardening!

Darien Library welcomes local landscape designer and award-winning photographer, Emily Kelting, who will teach you how to create your very own garden paradise. 

Sound intriguing? It is! Now more than ever, our homes and gardens need to be our "sanctuaries" - for personal relaxation, family fun, and entertainment.  Learn how Emily, owner of GreatScapes, a local landscape company in business for 21 years, has transformed her own gardens, and those of her clients, into personal retreats and refuges from daily life. Discover important factors that landscape designers consider when designing a property - important considerations for DIY’ers too!  Emily will provide helpful resources you can use in the planning and installation of landscape and hardscape (i.e. everything that isn’t green!) at your house. 

Turn that backyard into something glorious!

About Emily Kelting

Emily Kelting has lived many lives and had nine careers.  She’s a graduate of Vassar College and earned her certificate in Landscape Design in 2007 from the New York Botanical Garden, where she has also  taught Landscape Design and Photography. 

The owner of GreatScapes, based in New Canaan, she has worked for 21 years for discerning clients on properties that range from condominium terraces to 7.5 acre estates. Emily is also a long-time member of the New Canaan Garden Club, a speaker for the Garden Club of America, and a popular presenter at garden clubs,  libraries, community centers, and historical societies.  

An award-winning photographer, Emily has travelled to Asia, Africa, Europe and North and South America to capture the spirit of the people and places she visits.  She’s also happy to come home.  Recently, having downsized to an apartment with no garden of her own, she feels fortunate to work in her GreatScapes clients’ gardens and on Sprite Island, a private, rustic yacht club, where she paddles her kayak around the Norwalk Islands and serves as the head of the Grounds Committee.

In her past lives, she was a professional figure skater with the International Holiday on Ice, a freelance writer and on staff at New York and Self Magazines, with over 100 published magazine and newspaper articles to her credit, as well as a book, “Little Winners:  Inside the World of the Child Sports Star”, about child athletes. Emily is the founder of Ice Skating for Everyone, a non-profit that teaches ice skating to underserved children in Fairfield County, and was a former teammate on the New Canaan Mother Puckers women's hockey team. 

Photo credit:  H. John Voorhees III, Norwalk Hour