Cacti, Tropicals, Exotic Plants grown locally in Grant Park.
Greenshed Gardens is a one-person studio building sculptural cactus arrangements from quarried rock, hand-thrown pots, and slow-growing succulents. Each piece is composed by hand and ships ready to sit on a sill, shelf, or hearth for years without complaint.
Portfolio
A selection of arrangements from the last few seasons. Each is a single edition — once it’s placed, it’s placed.
No. 21
Basalt Terrace
Golden barrel cactus, stacked black basalt, unglazed stoneware base
No. 18
Low Tide
Old man cactus, tumbled beach granite, speckled ceramic dish
No. 24
Ridge Line
Three euphorbia, split grey slate, blackened steel tray
No. 15
Salt Flat
Astrophytum cluster, white quartz gravel, raw clay pot
No. 27
Night Bloom
Night-blooming cereus, sandstone, hand-forged iron pot
No. 09
Quarry Nine
Mixed columnar cacti, leftover quarry stone, cast concrete trough
What goes into a piece
■ Medium
Basalt, slate, quartz, and sandstone, sourced from quarry offcuts and a few riverbeds I have standing permission to visit. Every rock is chosen in person — nothing arrives by catalog.
■ Vessel
Stoneware thrown on my own wheel, plus steel and concrete forms from two makers I trade with. A pot has to drain fast — cacti rot in anything that holds water.
■ Specimen
Nursery-grown and propagated from cuttings, never collected from the wild. Most pieces use plants between three and twelve years old by the time they’re placed.
About Greenshed Gardens
Greenshed Gardens is a small studio built around one idea: rock and cactus belong together. It started as a windowsill collection that outgrew its windowsill, and it’s now one wheel, one bench, and several hundred rocks sorted by weight and color.
I build slowly, sell rarely, and consider a piece finished when I stop wanting to move a stone.
I’m Michael — I trained as a potter before I ever planted a cactus, and it shows in the way I think about a piece: the vessel matters as much as what grows out of it. Most weekday mornings I’m out at a quarry or a riverbed with a wheelbarrow, and most afternoons I’m at the bench, turning a rock over and over until it finally sits right.
— Michael, Greenshed Gardens
Get in touch
Whether you’re after a commissioned piece built for a specific spot, or you’d like to buy one of the arrangements already made, I’d love to hear from you.
greenshedgardens@gmail.com
I answer inquiries within a week, usually less.
GREENSHED GARDENS 