The Mint Gardener Collection
This fall, glassybaby is thrilled to introduce a collaboration with Seattle artist Sarah Simon, known to many as @themintgardener. Inspired by her quarter-acre urban garden, a barn owl who follows her on morning runs, and sunflowers grown from her grandfather’s saved seeds, Sarah has brought three new glassybaby to life: the pumpkin, the owl, and the sunflower. We sat down with Sarah to talk about her unexpected path to art, the women who inspire her, and the simple rituals that help her slow down and notice the beauty all around us.
glassybaby: Share with us a bit about the Mint Gardener @themintgardener., and your passion for gardening and painting. What first drew you to gardening, and how did painting become part of that story? Where does your inspiration come from?
Sarah: I have always been creative, always happiest when I’m creating with my hands, whether it’s painting or weeding in the garden. But like a lot of people, I stuffed those creative urges down and followed a more sensible path through college at the University of Washington and into a career in economics and HR. Art felt too scary, too vulnerable. I kept side-stepping every chance I was given to claim it.
Until Art caught up with me. I broke my foot...tripped in flip-flops, the least glamorous origin story, and was forced to slow down. A dear friend dragged me to the art store on crutches and said, “You have to sit still, so you will paint.” And that was it. I was reminded why I ever wanted to be an artist in the first place: when I’m creating, I feel the most me.
TheMintGardener grew from that same spirit. My favorite thing in the garden was throwing seeds in the general direction of dirt and seeing what came up. Mint, however, was my signature. I never planted it but somehow it found me in every flower bed. I was amazed at how it flourished everywhere, in shade or sun, with almost no effort on my part. Being a “Mint Gardener” was a bit of a laugh between my husband and me, because you don't garden mint; mint gardens YOU. But it also captured something true about my philosophy in art and in life: give beauty a little room, and it will surprise you with its abundance.
My inspiration lives in the garden. I adore an English-style cottage garden where zinnias and coneflowers spill over each other, where late summer lilies and cosmos bob in the golden hour breeze. Observing flowers in all their stages: some spent, some lifting their petals to the sun, unruly yet beautiful, fills my creative cup completely. As Julia Cameron wrote, “Quality of life is in proportion, always, to the capacity for delight. The capacity for delight is the gift of paying attention.” That is everything I try to do, in the garden and at the painting table.
glassybaby: Do you remember the first time you saw or held a glassybaby? What stood out about the color?
Sarah: Absolutely—and it’s one of the things that drew me to this collaboration so deeply. But let me start with how glassybaby first came into my life, because the story says everything.
My first glassybaby was a gift from my mother-in-love, Sandra Lea. I won the lottery with her. She has such extraordinary class, and over the years she has quietly taught me so many important things, but two that stand out right now: how to give a truly beautiful gift, and how to move through the world as a woman who lifts other women up. She is at every single event of mine. She is the first to celebrate everyone in her life. She is so generous with her time and her love that being around her makes YOU want to be more generous too.
I still remember the moment she walked into my birthday party carrying that white bag with the telling white bow, and the way my heart leapt hoping it was for me. It was. That first lighting of my own glassybaby — watching the light bloom through the colored glass and fill the room with the softest warmth—still makes me smile just thinking about it.
Sandra was also the very first person I called when I began creating the colors and names for this harvest collection. Of course she was.
That spirit of women gathering, celebrating, noticing beauty in both the smallest and biggest moments of life — is exactly what glassybaby embodies. And it is exactly what I see in my art retreats, in my painting community, in the women who show up to create together. They are always looking for beauty. They are always looking for ways to honor it and share it. And that is all of the amazing glassybaby friends too!
glassybaby: Every glassybaby is handmade and a little different, much like a hand-painted piece of art you create. Do you see a connection in that?
Sarah: Absolutely! This is just one of the many reasons why the connection between glassybaby and this handmade art Harvest line feels so natural to me. When I paint, there is a moment where the paint takes on a life of its own—it blooms and moves and shines in ways you could never have fully planned. Each piece becomes its own living thing. No two are ever exactly alike. And I think that’s the whole beautiful point. Unique art for each uniquely beautiful human!
glassybaby is the same way. Each votive is handmade by a unique soul, shaped by a dream and heat and color. The slight variations in each votive, the way light moves through every single one differently — that’s soul. When I hold a glassybaby, I think: someone made this. I feel that same way about my paintings. And I think the people who love handmade things feel it too—there’s something that passes between maker and receiver that a machine simply cannot replicate.
It’s why this collection feels so meaningful. Two things made by hand, shaped by color and light, each one a little different from the last and both of them made to be shared.
glassybaby: What’s one simple ritual you’d encourage readers to try this season, with a candle, a garden, a paintbrush, or all three?
Sarah: Honestly? All three. But let me start small, because small is where the magic starts.
Pick up something warm that you can hold in your hands, and find a spot that feels beautiful, even if “somewhere beautiful” is just your kitchen window with a glassybaby candle lit on the sill. Then slow down enough to pay attention to one thing. How the flame moves. Invite your mind to list out the things that you are most grateful for, today. How amazing the tomato harvest was this October. The curl of a single petal of flowers that you can see. The warm cup of something lovely in your hands. A warm note from a friend. How the sunlight falls across your countertop.
On January 1, 2024, I started a daily drawing practice. I thought I’d do it for 100 days, but I never stopped. Not because every drawing is good (many are very much not HA) but because that ten minutes of paying attention to something beautiful marks my day and changes my mindset. It makes me better for my family, my work: more patient, kind, gentle and more awake to the world.
So my ritual for this season: light a candle. Pour something lovely to drink. Think about a few new things every morning that I am grateful for. And then, may I invite you? Find one beautiful thing—a last bloom, a fallen leaf, a glassybaby throwing color across your table—and draw it, or just sit with it. You don’t need to be an artist. You just need to show up and settle in, take notice. The capacity for delight is always there, waiting. We just have to let ourselves slow down enough to find it.
Inspirations for the Designs
My husband Colin and I have been building, planting, sowing, and harvesting in our little quarter-acre urban garden in Seattle for more than a decade—and the pumpkin has always felt like the garden’s most triumphant finale. You tuck a seed into the soil in early summer, and then, almost impossibly, that one seed sends out sprawling vines that seem to take over everything in the most joyful, unstoppable way. Mint would be proud.
By the time September arrives and those first orange orbs begin to glow from the tangle of leaves, I feel the same delight I did as a child: the harvest has arrived, and it is glorious. Our garden has taught us so much over the years—patience, perseverance, how to fail and learn and try again—and the pumpkin, to me, is the living symbol of all of that. The shape of it, the warmth of it, the way it practically glows in the golden hour light—it begged to be made into something even more beautiful than it already is.
This etched design carries all of that with it: the joy of growing something from nothing, the abundance of the season, and the deep satisfaction of a harvest well earned.
I have a feeling that the owls find me, wherever I go.
There is a barn owl that follows me on my morning runs along the trails near home, and I have learned to look up for her, and to look down after, for the feathers she leaves behind like small gifts on the path.
I have always loved moving slowly through the world this way: running trails, taking long walks with family and friends, exploring any new place I can find on foot, soaking it all in. The owl has become a quiet companion in that practice of paying attention. And then, impossibly, this finding followed me across the ocean.
At my art retreat in the Cotswolds last September, and again in the Loire Valley of France this past summer, owls were there every night—calling to us through the darkness of the countryside in that deep, pitched way they have. One evening in France, an evening's eclipse gave way to a meteor shower (it was wildly amazing timing), and I lay in the chateau’s garden with my daughters and the incredible women who had come from near and far to create together, all of us watching the stars fall while the owls sang their nightly serenade. I knew, even as it was happening, that we were living inside a core memory.
The owl, beyond her ancient symbolism of wisdom, has come to mean something more personal to me: a moment of awe and surrender, of magic and resilience, of being present enough to notice that something extraordinary is happening right now, in this very garden, under these ancient stars. That is what this piece carries. Take the moments to pause and look and soak your toes in the earth, and always leave room for wonder.
My love of flowers seems to be in my very bones, traced all the way back to my grandfather’s overflowing garden along the Oregon coast, where summers meant cousins and dirt and my grandmother’s piano drifting through open windows while Grandpa showed us how sunflower seeds actually came from the center of those giant yellow faces.
I can still feel their coarse, hairy leaves brushing my arms as I raced through the rows. Their faces were higher than I could reach, turning all day to follow the sun, and I would crouch low and hide beneath those enormous leaves during games of tag—shadowed and cool and still, a secret green world that felt like the most magical place on earth.
The last time my aunt visited my grandfather, she went home with seeds from his beloved giants, and she sent them to me in a small envelope that I could hardly believe would become the flowers I remembered so vividly.
Now, year after year, my own Seattle garden grows them—stretching over twelve feet tall, with stalks thicker than my arm, so abundant we hand them to anyone who would like them. And here is the part that makes me stand in awe every time: I am now gifting great-great-grandbabies of my grandfather’s sunflowers to neighbors and friends all over our street.
Every late summer, I walk past their yellow faces stretching up to the sunshine in garden after garden, and I think of him, and my aunt and the growing legacy of this tradition. The sunflower, to me, is not just a flower. It is a love letter passed from hand to hand, season after season, rooted in the most beautiful kind of abundance—the kind you give away.
