Find Your Green Thumb in the Concrete Jungle

	A Secret Garden
	Photo: Robin Noble

Everyone knows a city dweller who dreams of trading the asphalt jungle for a life of working the soil.

New Yorker Erin Combs managed to get the latter without the former -- and if you're an urbanite who wants to add some natural beauty to your concrete existence, you'd do well to follow her example.

Combs, 32, is the founder of Jardiniere, a three-year-old urban gardening company run from her Brooklyn Heights brownstone apartment.

Growing up in Farmington, Maine, or as she calls it, "the middle of nowhere," everything was potential garden space, and her parents started her digging in the dirt at an early age. "Mom and Dad were escaped Long Islanders," she says, "and I think they just ran out of gas in Farmington."

At Mount Holyoke College in western Massachusetts, Combs majored in psychology but spent much of her time, including summers, working in the school's arboretum. "It's sort of an addiction," Combs says of her gardening urge.

After two summers working for a gardener aunt in the often lavish gardens of the Hamptons, a brief stint in insurance consulting and then an unsatisfying foray into graduate school, Combs ended up at a high-end Manhattan horticultural firm named Town & Gardens, where she spent a happy year learning the many differences between urban gardening and its country cousin. Eventually, the subway commute took its toll, and friends convinced her that the five years she'd spent in Brooklyn helping them with their gardens on the side had given her a sufficient client base to plant her own flag.

Zero Advertising, Zeroscaping

In its three-year existence, Jardiniere hasn't spent a dime on advertising, relying solely on word-of-mouth to reach into the soil of nearby neighborhoods. Its 40 or so clients pay $50 per man hour, and Combs recently added her first full-time employee. ...