Garden at Creel & Gow
It’s Like Being at Trade Secrets Year-Round

By Tara Kelly
Photos by Jiatong Lu

Liza Pinder-Steinmetz, the manager of Garden at Creel & Gow at the entrance to the village of Millbrook, has gardening seeded into her DNA. “I got it from my mum, who lives in West Sussex, England, and is a major gardener,” she says. She’d been managing Orangerie, the nursery and garden shop adjacent to Creel & Gow, for the last four years. But then Orangerie decamped, and with the full backing of brothers Larry and Jamie Creel, a new vision for a garden shop is blooming. Pinder-Steinmetz brings a particularly British view to gardening—a focus on the structure of plants and their role across all seasons, not just when in bloom. In the nursery, she is a fan of
fastigiate trees—columnar, typically evergreen. “They’re the pillars of gardening,” she says. “We have a short growing season here, so it’s really wonderful to have strong architectural elements that reveal themselves in the winter.” Customers looking for perennials will find old
favorites, perhaps in new varieties, and always thoughtfully selected bedding plants. The shop holds a curated selection of garden furniture, French antiques sourced by Creel from France, Japanese garden tools, ceramics, urns, and many more things for the home. In the greenhouse, she’s leaning into tropicals, tabletop topiaries, and exotic geraniums, “because everybody wants a good house gift,” she says.