About Julie Hill and Southern Wild

By today’s standards, I would have been labeled a “wild child” and my parents would have been hauled away for child endangerment. I am the product of parents who allowed their children to climb trees, build huts with scavenged materials, and roam the countryside with a gang of similarly wild children guarded only by a dog. All unsupervised for countless hours day after day.

We got dirty. We employed the five second rule. We rode two and three on a bicycle with no helmets. We pulled radishes from the garden, brushed off the dirt, and ate them on the spot. We encountered rattlesnakes and coyotes and occasionally kept a horned toad in our pockets. Particularly the tiny baby ones. We rode on the open tailgate of my dad’s pickup truck and bareback on the neighbor’s horses and pigs. I have very few memories of my childhood spent indoors.

Summers were filled with gardens, fresh vegetables, shelling peas, picking beans and tomatoes, and gathering wild plums. My mother canned and put up bags and bags of frozen vegetables to preserve the summer’s bounty. My dad grew the most amazing zinnias.

Yes, I grew up as a wild child and lived to tell the story!

I was born and raised in Texas, lived my adult life in Austin, and was eventually transplanted in South Carolina.

So what should you know about the adult me? I am a serial do-it-yourself-er inside the house and in the garden. I love tools…good tools…preferably those that require a large battery or electrical outlet. Nothing pink. I think that good tools are the biggest secret that mankind keeps from womankind.

I love knowing how things work. I have a great admiration for McGyver. And I don’t believe we always have to follow “the rules.” (Who makes those anyway?)

My favorite stores are Home Depot, Pottery Barn, and Ikea. I believe that cool stuff can be found in hardware stores.

I love growing things…particularly flowers that bring both beauty and wildlife to my garden. I am a proponent of native plants.

Southern Wild is my landscape design and garden maintenance business as well as home to an urban, cut-flower market garden. Design allows me to arrange the beauty that nature gives us. It allows me the opportunity to work with people to foster an appreciation and respect for that beauty. (see ServicesHaving some fun with the children at Wild-Connections Butterfly Farm & Nature Center

I am an educator by training, gardener by choice, and worshiper of the natural world. I appreciate good literature, movies, music, coffee, and food. I have a masters degree in instructional design and a diploma in landscape design. My professional work experience includes teaching children to read, writing and editing educational materials, and owning and operating a butterfly farm and nature center. (Yelp, you read that correctly. I was a butterfly farmer! See this post.)

I am deeply grateful for the life I am experiencing and am excited to build new relationships through a common goal to create and maintain beauty on this earth.

Do contact me with your gardening design and maintenance questions and needs. And if you are looking for beautiful flowers, perhaps I can help.