‘Like adding art to a room’: Local startup offers container garden design services

Gilded Lily Designs plans and installs planters at homes and businesses. (Photos courtesy Gilded Lily Designs)

Skills learned from childhood chores have blossomed into a new business venture for Brit Trible.

Her recently launched Gilded Lily Designs installs and maintains planters at residences and businesses in the Richmond and Charlottesville areas.

Trible described the company’s services as being somewhere between landscaping a yard and curating a home’s decor. Gilded Lily advises clients on types of containers and what kind of plants make sense for a space, sources the appropriate materials and then installs them at home entrances, patios and outside storefronts.

“Our work is container gardening. That’s a custom-designed potted arrangement we can put in a personal or corporate space,” she said. “You’re adding a subtle pop of something interesting, it’s like adding art to a room.”

Brit Trible

Trible said the origins of the concept go back to her childhood on a Chesterfield horse farm. She said some of her earliest memories were of helping her mother as she planted and maintained decorative gardens on the property.

“She would drag me around to replant bushes at the farm,” Trible said.

Trible continued gardening as an adult and in recent years started to work on plantings at the homes of friends and family for fun. With their encouragement, she decided to formally turn the activity into a business this summer.

“It brought so much joy for them and for me,” Trible said. “I realized this is something I’m super passionate about and wanted to turn into a business.”

The company offers a one-off installation service as well as a seasonal subscription service, in which Gilded Lily comes by quarterly to refresh and swap in appropriate plants as the seasons go by. It also offers holiday-themed arrangements.

The company charges a flat fee of $11.50 per square inch for the installation and design of a project. The measurement is based on the size of the container or containers involved, and the fee includes plants and labor. Also included is training for the client to keep the plants alive, though a separate service is available to handle things such as pruning and watering.

Gilded Lily will provide pots and containers at an additional cost or work with the client’s existing planters.

The company had 20 residential and commercial clients across Richmond and Charlottesville as of last week.

Gilded Lily is largely a one-woman show, but Trible occasionally calls on one or two contractors to help with larger jobs.

A potted plant arrangement by Gilded Lily Designs.

Trible said she spends the bulk of her professional time on Gilded Lily, but still occasionally works as an occupational therapist. She is married to Paul Trible, the owner of local menswear company Ledbury.

Looking forward, she hopes to expand Gilded Lily’s reach throughout Virginia and grow its commercial client base.

Trible said Gilded Lily is catching on, and believes the concept is meeting a need as a dedicated designer of small-scale, decorative outdoor plantings intended to complement a house.

“There was this void of really finishing your home, where you look at steps or an entryway and there’s something missing,” she said. “I think landscaping really ties your home together and builds that softness around a structure.”