In the Garden with Sara

At fourteen, she took her first job at the English Rose Floral Shop. The work was traditional and, by Sara's own account, not exactly her aesthetic: homecoming corsages made by the hundred, catalog arrangements, three-foot-tall red roses sprayed with gold or silver glitter. She quickly discovered she had a knack for it.

It wasn't until she moved to Charleston and began working at a flower shop on King Street that a style of her own began to take shape. Three decades later, that early instinct has grown into SYG Designs, her Charleston-based plant and floral design studio, where the work ranges from residential florals and longstanding hospitality accounts to a select number of events each year.

Ask Sara where an arrangement begins and the answer is usually with whatever looks beautiful right now.

For her own work, that might be a branch from the garden or a vine at exactly the moment it is ready to cut. For a client, the considerations widen. She wants to see the room: the paint color on the walls, the china, the linens. Where the arrangement will end up is as much a part of it as what goes in the vase.

She has her signatures. Passion flower vine, with its curling tendrils and almost alien bloom, goes into nearly everything as soon as it is ready to harvest. Pink jasmine is another favorite. “I like wild-looking things overall,” she says.

Flowers, she is quick to point out, aren't innately feminine. Even a vase full of hydrangeas can feel entirely different in a dark, moody vessel, left long and loose rather than overly arranged.

“If there are too many flowers in an arrangement, I'm immediately like, you should have stopped halfway there.”

Her tables follow much the same rule. Sometimes the answer isn't flowers at all. A fern or beautiful plant in the rig

Sara and her husband, Ian, had been looking for land on Wadmalaw for several years when she nearly gave up and committed to a commercial lease elsewhere. The following week, her real estate agent sent her a listing. Sara was on her way to the airport, but drove out to see it anyway. She walked the property on Friday. By Sunday, it was theirs.

Wadmalaw was nonnegotiable. Its longstanding commitment to conservation offered something increasingly difficult to find around Charleston: room to grow without the expectation that everything around it would eventually be developed. “It feels like it was meant to be,” she says.

In three years, they have planted somewhere between eighty-four and ninety-six trees. At least a hundred more are planned for this year. Much of it is planted with the future in mind: trees they'll eventually cut from, vines that will find their way into arrangements, branches and greenery that can be difficult to source any other way.

In a good summer, as much as a quarter of what SYG Designs delivers to its hotel and restaurant accounts can be grown or cut on the property. That matters particularly in Charleston's heat, when flowers shipped from elsewhere can arrive damaged—or, if a box misses its flight, go straight to the compost.

Most evenings, Sara and Ian get on the golf cart and make a slow circuit of the property. Sometimes they bring a drink. Their cat, Mushoo, rides along. They look at what is thriving, what needs water, and what might need another season. At that hour, the light across the farm can turn pink or orange, something Sara attributes to all the water surrounding the island, even when none of it is visible.

Sara and Blake Sams were collaborators long before Wentworth opened its doors. One of their earliest projects together was a dinner in the Crescent. Blake set the table with lamps in black shades and asked Sara for greenery rather than flowers. She brought dark vessels from her inventory that, until then, no one else had wanted.

“Finally, somebody who gets it,” she remembers thinking.

They have been working together ever since. Their conversations rarely stay neatly within their respective disciplines. Sara wants to talk about the chairs and the linens; Blake has opinions about the flowers, plants, and containers. Both are willing to push the other a little further. “When we work on something together, the end product is always some of our favorite,” Sara says.

When Blake began imagining Wentworth, plants were already part of the plan—specifically, Sara's. Today, she keeps the shop supplied with some of her more unusual finds: an ever-changing assortment of Australian tree ferns, interesting begonias, and the occasional “funky orchid.”

Sara is also a habitual antiquer and thrifter, making weekly rounds in search of pots and containers. There is a constant question of what to keep and what to bring to Wentworth. Her rule is fairly reliable: “If it's anything cool or interesting or something that we might want to keep, we bring it to the store.”

Sara and her team are in regularly to tend to the plants and see what’s new. Often, Blake will find a vessel he loves and Sara will find just the thing to put in it. Other times, a particularly spectacular plant arrives first and they find the right place for it in the shop.

Asked what she’d like to see next at Wentworth, Sara doesn’t hesitate: the back courtyard. She imagines it filled with plants, pots, and antique urns—a garden of sorts, just beyond the shop. Given her and Blake’s track record, it may only be a matter of time.