K enton J. Seth is a Grand Junction native who spent a decade in public horticulture and the nursery trade before founding Paintbrush Gardens in 2013, working out of the canyon country of western Colorado. His reputation rests on three overlapping specialisms: native plantings, dryland meadows, and the unirrigated crevice garden — a form of rock garden that mimics the cracks and seeps in which alpine and steppe plants actually grow.
He runs a small specialist nursery, propagated under net-zero greenhouses, to grow the species he needs for his own commissions. The work spans residential and public projects across the western United States and onto both coasts, with the occasional project further afield, and is informed by long stretches of field plant exploration and a steady output of writing and lecturing for rock garden societies and design magazines.
With Paul Spriggs he co-authored The Crevice Garden, the first full English-language treatment of a form of gardening that, in an age of disappearing water, is no longer a curiosity.
