- I'm Madeline Hooper.

I've been gardening for decades and living with aches and pains.

So I finally decided that maybe I should find a fitness trainer to see if I could fix my problems.

And after learning better ways to use my body in the garden, it dawned on me, what would be more exciting than to travel all over America, visiting a wide variety of gardeners and helping their gardeners get garden fit.

In Season 1, for all our guest gardeners, gardening was their life.

For Season 2, we're going to visit artists who are also passionate gardeners.

And for this lucky group, I'm so thrilled and excited to welcome this Season's Garden Fitness Professional, Adam Schersten.

Taking care of your body while taking care of your garden, that's our mission.

- [Narrator] GardenFit is made possible, in part, by Monrovia.

[bright upbeat music] [silence] [gentle upbeat music] - Adam, we are going to visit Frances Palmer.

And Francis is a ceramicist and one that is highly regarded and collected by museums.

Lots of galleries show her work and certainly, many gardeners collect her vases to put their flowers in.

In addition to pottery, she's a gardener, an entrepreneur, a photographer, a beekeeper, a cook, and she loves putting up reserves.

- Sounds like a real Renaissance woman.

- Oh, and I think she is.

And I've really been a fan of Frances for years and I am lucky enough to have collected some of her vases.

- She made all of these?

- She did, take a look.

- Wow, these are great.

- Aren't they fabulous?

I love just touching them.

- Yeah, you can tell they're handmade and really unique pieces, each and every one.

- She's also very legendary because of her cutting garden, which I know is full of all kinds of flowers.

You know, big and small and, oh, all colors.

But her favorite flower is a dahlia and I'm really excited to see her collection of dahlias.

- Yeah, it's a good choice.

- So I also mentioned that she's a photographer, right?

And she takes her vases and her flowers and pairs them together and makes the still life, really, almost portraits of them that she photographs and puts up for all of her many followers on Instagram.

- Sounds like there's gonna be a lot to see.

- I think we will find a lot to see.

This is such a beautiful property.

- Yeah, I love it, love seeing all these trees.

I can't wait to see them closer.

- Frances.

- Hi, Madeline.

- I'm so happy to be here.

- I'm so glad to see you.

- Frances, this is Adam.

- Hi, nice to meet you.

- Great to meet you.

- Frances Palmer, Adam Schersten.

So we're here.

- I know, it's so exciting.

Thank you so much.

- Oh, my goodness.

I'm just thrilled that we can share your garden, see your ceramics and everything that you're up to.

But I thought maybe before we start, what came first?

Did you start actually always knowing that you wanted to work with your hands and do pottery?

- I actually didn't start making ceramics till I moved out to Connecticut and had our daughter.

- Really?

Were you always a gardener?

- Well, I grew up in New Jersey, in Morristown, New Jersey, which was, back then, great farm country.

But it wasn't really until I moved to this property that I had the kind of the open space and the sun to start.

And by that time, I'd been doing the ceramics for a number of years.

But I really wanted to learn to grow the flowers, so that I could use them in the photography for the work.

- It's is so exciting, the blending of your garden and your flowers and your ceramics.

- Yeah, blending everything together.

- Yeah, everything has a utility to it.

- It's all so special, so artistic.

- Yeah, yeah.

- So may we see the first garden you came upon when you moved in here?

- Sure, absolutely, yeah.

Yeah, this is the first garden.

It looks so different now.

When we first moved in here around 30 years ago, there wasn't a fence.

- It disappears, it looks so natural.

- Yeah, well, come on, I can take you inside.

- Frances, this is a breathtaking place to be.

The colors, the shapes, it's magnificent.

- Thank you.

- And you must love being in here.

- I do, I love being in here and it's incredible because I try to come out early in the morning to beat the bees and they're already here.

So, you know, and the hummingbirds.

- A lot of birds, right?

- A lot of birds, yeah.

- You have that amaranth and different plants that they must just love.

- Yeah, that amaranth is called hot biscuits.

And I purposely plant it every year because it's such a sturdy branch that I can be in my studio and look out and the birds are just sitting on the branches, eating all the seeds.

I just, I love that.

- Wow.

- Wonderful.

- Yeah.

- And the bees must love this place.

- The bees love it.

And I have a lot of mountain mint over there and the bees just go crazy for that.

And the hibiscus.

- The hibiscus, look at the color of that red.

- Right.

- Yeah.

- I start in the spring.

This is all filled with tulip bulbs and daffodil bulbs and hyacinth.

And once they're done, then I plant in all the dahlias, I have lots of bearded iris that bloom.

- Wow.

- And so it's really a succession of things.

Over here, where it's shady, I have a lot of Japanese anemones and Joe Pye weed and all sorts of plant hosta that like the shade.

And over there, on that side, are all the old roses that bloom once.

So those happen in June.

And then again, back to the natives and the pollinators over there.

- It seems like the mixture, like, do you think about what colors go next to each other?

Or you just put- - No, it's just, I like the randomness.

And so many of the dahlias, because I dig them up every year, are sort of old and they're like friends to me when I see them.

Like, this one right here, you know, this, this one and this one.

I just go, "Oh," you know, "Hi, I am so glad you're back."

- Wow.

- These are all seem to be in perfect balance 'cause you have them sort of staked or caged.

- Yeah, they'll hold each other up as they get taller.

- We can't depend on holding each other up, can we, Adam?

- No.

- And then I do the zinnias in front and there's the Queen Anne's lace.

- Do you cut in here?

How do you get back in there?

- I just have to squeeze through, which is why you're here, right?

- I'm going to figure out how to do that.

That's a big squeeze.

- Yeah.

- But it's wonderful that they're all sort of supported and they look so fresh.

They look like they have good posture at it.

- They really do.

- Yes, they do.

- I know we wanted to talk about that.

but this is a shining example.

- I know.

- What a great place to, like, start your day to walk with a cup of coffee.

- It is, I do.

- Just surrounded by this beauty.

- Yeah, yep.

Would you like to walk over and see the other garden?

- We'd love to.

- Okay, good.

- Absolutely.

- We'll follow you.

- Okay.

So I'm going to show you my other garden now.

- I love all these ferns, Frances, did you put these in?

- No, these actually have been here long before we moved in.

I don't really have to do anything to them.

- Oh, my goodness.

Adam, this is a tennis court.

- Wow.

- Really?

- Okay, there's a story behind this for sure because- - Absolutely.

Well, it's kind of a funny story.

When this tennis court was originally built in the 1930s and when we moved in, about 30 years ago, all the fencing had fallen down.

You know, the asphalt was cracked.

So we repaved it, put up the net, but none of us really ever played tennis.

And so after our kids moved away and I wanted more gardening space, my husband suggested I use this because it was all fenced in.

- What a great idea.

- Yeah.

So it took us a while to actually take the net down, but the net is gone.

And now, what's happened is as it's aged, it's all cracked and everything kind of comes through the cracks.

I started out with eight raised beds and now I have about 30.

I have bees down in the corner.

- Clearly, you can't dig in a tennis court.

- No.

- So I love that you do raised beds.

- Yeah, the raised beds work great.

And every year, I put in fresh organic manure, so the soil stays healthy and yeah, and if you see this garden in March, there's not a stick of anything growing.

- Wow.

- Yeah.

Except, I mean, we do prune back the rose bushes, but all the other plant material either comes back or I have to plant it.

- So all the dahlias come out?

- All the dahlias come out every fall.

- So much work.

- It's a lot of work.

But, you know, every time I dig them them up, I go, "Why am I doing this?"

And then, you know?

- And then this is why.

- Spring's eternal, you know?

- Yeah, exactly.

- Yeah.

- You just look at this.

- Yeah, yeah, I know.

- That's why, fantastic.

It's so dense, France.

- Yeah, yeah.

- I love that feeling of it, I mean, it seems like a community in each bed.

- I know, it's true.

And it's funny because it's only August and as I was saying, it really reaches a crescendo in September.

So you have to come back.

- Wow.

- And I love all the labels.

- And the staking.

- And the staking, yeah, and the tomato cages, which are not beautiful, but functional.

I mean, it is a cutting garden.

- Yeah, this is like a library, almost the warehouse of flowers.

- Yeah, yeah.

- It's so fantastic.

- Very exciting.

- Thank you.

- And then the bees.

- And then the bees, so yeah, I love how I've had the bees now for eight or nine years and maybe even longer.

- Wow.

- And some years, I get honey, some years, I don't.

This year, I got a lot of honey.

Happy to share.

- That's the thing, we love honey.

- We do.

- And yeah, so it's, you know, lots of bees, lots of birds, lots of hummingbirds.

So I just enjoy watching everybody have a good time.

- Isn't that great?

- Yeah.

- I think it's wonderful to have the bees and I'm sure they go all over.

- They go all over and there are lots of native bees.

There are lots of bumblebees and all, you know, ground bees and all of those types too.

Everybody has room.

- So besides your flower gardens, what else do you grow?

- Yeah, well, I have a lot of fruit trees down below.

I've been putting in an orchard steadily over the last decade.

- Oh, what fun.

- Lots of citrus trees that go in the greenhouse in the wintertime.

- Can we go see both?

- Absolutely.

- So this tree looks interesting.

- Very fruitful.

- This is an Asian pear, which is really beautiful for eating.

They should be ripe in a few weeks.

So all of these trees, this was all weeds here.

And so over the last dozen years, I've been planting, keep planting, they go out that way.

But when I planted this seed, it was quite tiny.

That's a native persimmon.

- Wow.

- Wow, how many years for, like, this one, for example, to start fruiting like this?

- Yeah, this is about 10 years old, that apple tree is a little bit older.

- Right.

- I was in England a number of years ago at Thomas Hardy's house and he had all these beautiful medlar, which is an ancient- - Ooh, look at that.

- Yeah.

- I don't even know what to call it.

So these are really good for jellies.

And you're not even supposed to harvest them until after a frost.

They need the frost.

- Really?

- I think it's called [inaudible].

sounds like something from "The Princess Bride."

- [inaudible].

- Like giant blueberries or something that open in.

- Yeah, right, right.

- So apple, I have peach, there's a nectarine, another apple.

- Wow, nectarine.

- Here's another medlar, apple.

- I love all these different foliages.

- Yeah, yeah.

The blackcurrants, I harvested, I make jam.

I try to make jam.

- I know you love preserves.

- I do, yeah, I do, I love them.

These are two quince trees.

And when I first saw them, I thought, "Oh, these are weird.

"They look like mangoes almost."

But they are quince and they're Chinese quince.

So I thought, "Oh, great, I waited 10 years "for those beautiful like European quince "that you could use in a photo."

- That's good.

- I mean, they, again, I make a great jelly with them.

And then, over here, is a native pawpaw.

I've yet to see a pawpaw after 12 years because the birds eat all the fruit.

So it's like my caffra tree I've got.

- So we can have a net then.

- No, t's too big to net.

I have plums over here.

I have more apples, mulberries, cherries.

- Wow.

- I have a food store, I just keep going.

I call it my arboretum.

- Arboretum.

They're wonderful.

And also, they'll produce a lot of shade.

Do you know you know, sort of a pretty walk.

- Yeah, they are, I mean- - It's a beautiful walk.

- Like, here, I love to do the Damson plum preserve.

- Oh, wow.

- There, more apple.

So yeah, I think that just gives me lots to work on.

- Now, those are picture apples, that looks like you styled that.

- I know, isn't that incredible?

- Yeah, really beautiful color.

- I know, and when I see the deer here, I'm like, "Don't think about the apple."

- Yeah.

- Now that I've showed you all the garden and everything, I really would love to talk to you about posture and how to hold myself well when I'm in the garden or in the studio and just a few ideas on what to think about during my day.

- Absolutely, yeah, that's a great idea.

I would love to, I mean, I think it's really important for everyone.

Posture's one of those tricky things that, you know, we all hear a term we throw around and we imagine it as kind of like chest up, shoulders back.

But really, that's kind of a static position.

And through life, we are rarely in static positions.

So posture quickly becomes your gate cycle.

It becomes bending over, it becomes working at your potter's wheel.

And so the best way to really start this is kind of finding what good alignment of the spine feels like from the inside.

This tree is actually perfect 'cause it has a nice straight trunk where we can use it as a guide to line up the spine.

And so if I stand at the base of it with my heels kind of close to the tree, they don't have to be actually touching.

'cause we do have some parts of our body that create space.

We want to try and find contact with our tailbone, with our midback and then with the back of our head.

So we have three main points of contact.

We got hips, midback, and back of head, okay?

And already, I can tell you, like, this is not how I stand and when I come away from this, I start to resort to my kind of more natural posture.

But this is a great place to come back to.

So why don't you guys both try?

- Okay.

- And we're really just trying to give an example to yourself from the inside about what it feels like to be perfectly lined up.

Just take this moment to kind of neutralize your pelvis a little bit to- - Get that?

- Yeah, exactly, so can you feel how just tilting the pelvis a little bit reduces that stress?

- Absolutely.

- Good.

And now, you could also take a moment to maybe roll your arms out, yep, or rotate the arms.

And that will, if you rotate far enough, it'll move into the shoulder blades.

And this is really how we can kind of reposition those shoulders.

But what I want to talk about most is really head position and how kind of silly it might feel or difficult it might feel to maintain the contact with the tree while we look up and down.

There's some tension resting in the back of the neck.

- Mm-hmm, yeah.

- Okay.

- And this is really what we're gonna, we're gonna take posture from a top down approach today.

- Oh, I like that.

- And so, Frances, for you, what I'm seeing as you try and look down is you can kind of get to neutral, but even, yeah, coming and looking down towards your feet would require you to take your head off of the tree.

And so as we stand here, that's what I want you to dig into.

That's the pressure, good.

That's the muscles that I want you to use, are these neck flexors that are really tilting the face down because the back of our neck really gets overworked in holding the weight of our head as we start to lean forward and the head comes forward.

So getting these neck flexors back into use will really help bring the body into that alignment.

- Oh, I like that.

- Okay, so first step would just be standing here and breathing into this position and feel how the breath may influence position, how, as you inhale, you may want to arch your back more.

As you exhale, you might find that your back pushes into the tree.

Try and hold good posture and make your ribs do the breathing.

Don't let your back move through that.

And as you breathe, you can start to chisel away at these muscles that are holding you in a bad position.

Because breath is something that we do several thousand times a day and can be one of those agents that is pulling you into the bad posture.

Just like sitting for many hours a day, okay?

- Right, can't have that.

- No, all right, so now, as we step away, the tricky thing is that as soon as we start to do any other activity, everything we just learn goes right out the window.

- Right.

- Right, because movement is so subconscious that we just focus on the task at hand.

We don't give much thought to our body position.

So now that we kind of have this better understanding of where our head should be resting on top of our shoulders, I want to take you through a few neck motions that can really help loosen up and then make all this a lot easier to maintain.

And so if we find that inner tree, imagine you had your tree behind you and you're going to tuck your chin in, find that contact.

We're just gonna move through our three planes of motion.

So the first one is gonna be looking left and right.

- And do you push yourself pretty far here?

- I do, maybe the first couple, I treat is a warmup.

And then I really try and really try and get that chin to get out over the shoulder, so I can really look 180 degrees.

And then the next one is forward and backwards, so kind of looking up and down.

But here, I don't want you to bring that- - Uh-huh.

- Exactly.

Try not to bring the head out of alignment.

Try and keep it over the shoulders and see how much of that up and down we can create with the, yeah, the down feels a little bit- - Sure.

- Unflattering - And I'll wait till I'm alone.

- Yeah, exactly right.

But then the last is kind of tipping from left to right.

And this one, you can really, if you do it low on the neck, you can feel that stretch or I know, I can, all the way out the shoulder- - Me too.

- Down into the collarbone.

- I'm very tight here.

- But, you know, the neck is made up of a bunch of vertebra.

And like I was saying before, movement is subconscious.

- No, it's so interesting that you've isolated the neck versus the whole thing.

It's really important.

- For sure.

- I've never thought about my neck, really, and posture.

- Yeah, I mean, it is, this is your central command and when this starts to kind of tighten up or fall out of place, everything really follows it.

And so that last one, you can actually move up the neck and really try and tip side to side from a little higher where maybe you're not feeling the stretch down through the shoulders, but you're feeling it more through the body of the neck.

And that's another really great one, just to keep all of this mobile and moving because as this starts to tighten up, you may see it in some people where they really can't- - Can't turn the head.

- Right.

- Yeah, and this just starts to really kind of erode at all of the freedom that we have to get out into the garden.

- Yeah.

- Yeah, just sit and- - Can't let that happen.

- No, have to keep flexible.

- Yeah.

- Yeah, and so this is, yeah, a really kind of underdressed area that really plays a great role in posture, so you can- - I know, I'm going to think about it in the studio.

- Yes, oh, the studio.

- Oh, yeah.

So we haven't seen that yet if you'd like to come with me.

- That'd be awesome.

- Oh, we'd love to come with you.

- Okay, perfect, let's go.

- Frances, will you tell us a little bit how you started your business?

- Well, I didn't have this amazing studio the first years.

As I mentioned, when we were outside, I had a daughter and was quite overwhelmed.

So I took a throwing class at an art guild in New Canaan.

I felt like when I started the ceramics, it was just something that I gravitated to and have done practically every day of my life since then.

And I never get tired of doing it.

- Every day?

- If I'm here, I'm working.

- Wow.

- And yeah, so I started growing the flowers, so that I could photograph the pieces in context, give scale to the pots, and also, have a way of documenting what I was selling and leaving the studio.

- You do all the pieces in here?

- Yes.

- So ust in terms of the mechanics of everything, you use a potter's wheel?

- Yeah, mostly.

Well, so, I have actually three potter's wheels.

So this one is for the white earthenware.

The one behind you in the middle is for the terracotta and dark stone wear.

And then the far wheel is for the white porcelain.

Because you can't combine, like, if I got some of the white earthenware into the porcelain and I took the porcelain up to the temperature, the 2350, it would explode.

So we have to be very careful about keeping the clay body separate.

- And so once you have formed them on the wheel, what happens next?

- Yeah, it has to get trimmed, it has to get the handles or whatever finishing work I'm doing.

And it has to get fired, then it has to get glazed.

I mean, it goes through- - A lot, and you fire it here, don't you?

- Yeah, I have two electric kilns, a wood-fired kiln and a gas fired kiln.

- Wow.

- These are processes that I don't have complete control over.

And if a painter takes a brush and puts something on the canvas, boom, it's on the canvas.

But the things that I do, I have to collaborate with the process, right?

I'm hoping things grow.

The weather, there's so many variables that are out of my control.

And I think the clay is very similar in the sense that I know, pretty much, what's going to happen, but there's always that unknown quality of what happens in the kiln.

And that just, personally, intrigues me and that's what kind of keeps me going, - Yeah.

- Yeah.

- So would you mind showing us what you put in each vase?

- I put, like, just a little display of what the different clay bodies look like.

You know, every clay body has to be addressed differently.

So I'll start with this one 'cause it has a nice wide opening.

So for something like that, I like to take, I like to take something like the goldenrod or the marigolds and use it.

I purposely grow these kind of branching flowers, so that they do just that.

They kind of give a bit of a support to all the singular blooms.

Okay, so that's going to give me the foundation.

So then when I wanna put in the dahlias or the roses, if it's starting to age, I'll just take off some of the leaves in the back.

Stick in a cosmos.

[bright upbeat music] - I love the selection of color now.

I don't think that I've ever put those colors together.

- Yeah, but they're working.

- They certainly are.

That's beginning to look like her garden.

- Yeah, it is.

Yeah, I mean, you know, I just want everybody to get along.

- I think the relationship between flowers, so depends on your personality of how you do things.

- Yes.

- Yeah.

- Look at that color.

- Wow.

- I mean, that's beautiful.

- Insane.

This one, look at this color.

Oh, my goodness, that's like this velvety fuchsia.

- It does look like velvet.

- Yeah.

Okay.

- Oh, my goodness.

That's fabulous.

- All right, so there's that one.

So then we can, you know, then you can do something like this where you just wanna show, like, one simple perfect.

I love these, like, big, I always have these big marigolds.

[bright upbeat music] - Oh, that's a great combo.

So the idea of one flower starts to go by the wayside, I think.

- Yeah.

- Right.

- I mean, I thought I wanted one flower, but I just thought, "No."

- Oh, that looks great.

- Just, oh, wait, so look at this one.

- Oh, that's fabulous.

All the colors seem to work no matter what.

- Yeah, exactly, right?

- Yeah.

- Yeah, I mean, and so do you use this backdrop?

This is the area where you do most of your filming?

- A lot of it, yeah.

[bright upbeat music] - Oh, I love that.

- Oh, there you go.

- Oh, there you go.

Fantastic, Frances.

- Wow.

- You do all your own photography, so I think that's just amazing.

- Yeah, right, I know.

How did that start?

- Does everything, yeah.

- I wanted to document everything, so I didn't feel like anybody would see the pieces the way I saw them.

- Frances, this was such a wonderful day.

We love being with you, I'm so excited I finally got to see your cutting gardens.

They're spectacular.

- Thank you for coming.

- Oh, my goodness, this is really a treat.

- Thank you, thank you.

So I I have- - You're gonna do more?

- Yeah, I'm going to, because I have all these flowers.

It's hard to stop at one.

- [Narrator] Get GardenFit with us.

[bright upbeat music] [gentle upbeat music] GardenFit is made possible, in part, by Monrovia.

[gentle upbeat music] [bright upbeat music]