She’s Here for the Plants

The famous American horticulturist Liberty Hyde Bailey wrote, “A garden requires patient labor and attention. Plants do not grow merely to satisfy ambitions or to fulfill good intentions. They thrive because someone expended effort on them.” Beyond patience and a willingness to expend effort, “someone” should ideally be imbued with equal parts science and art and have an intense love of plants.

Enter Sarah Copp, founder of Good Copp Creative, a landscape architecture and design firm that’s transforming Fort Worth yards into stunning expressions of natural beauty. A graduate of the University of Texas at Austin, Sarah spent her early career in high-profile marketing and advertising with Fortune 500 companies. But Sarah grew up in a gardening family where weekends were spent nursery hopping and planting new “finds” with her father. Never having been “a big fan of being indoors all the time,” she felt a deep pull to pursue the horticultural arts.

Knowing she was not prepared to go out on her own, Sarah thought outside the box to get real-world experience. She sent her resume to all the top landscape architecture firms in Dallas, where she lived at the time, offering herself as an in-house marketing expert in return for a paycheck and the opportunity to learn the business. It didn’t take long before one firm took her up on her offer. She spent the next several years learning landscape architecture and design on the ground while also earning her Texas Master Gardener certification. After COVID-19, her employers decided to retire, so Copp began to take on projects of her own here in Fort Worth, slowly growing her business through word-of-mouth referrals.

Then, a timely-though-unexpected post in the Tanglewood Moms Facebook group in February 2023 had business blooming. “It was like I had this new horse,” said Sarah, “and I was walking along next to it, thinking that someday I would be riding it. Then the next thing I knew, the horse was sprinting.” Sarah reminded herself that she was “here for the plants” and saddled up.

As a wife and mother of two girls (10 and 14), settling into the new pace of her life meant making some crucial decisions about priorities. “I still put my kids above all else,” says Sarah, “and working for myself gives me the flexibility I need to do that.”  It also gives Sarah the freedom to spend each June living and working in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where her sister lives and provides a white-glove home organization service for locals, as well as part-time residents and second homeowners. During a visit several years ago, Sarah started providing landscape design and implementation services to some of her sister’s clients. As in Fort Worth, her Jackson Hole client roster blossomed, and her annual summer visits have metamorphosed into lucrative work/play trips.

“My tagline is ‘Landscaping with Science and Style,'” said Sarah. “I think a lot about soils and sun and shade and drainage because I really care about the plants.” The plants that thrive in Fort Worth are not necessarily what will work in the Teton Mountains, though. “In Jackson Hole, they have a tiny growing season,” Sarah explained. “And you have to know what can and can’t be planted on the north or south side of a house. You have to know purple lupine is heartier than the pink variety.”

There is a strong movement in Jackson Hole to be “Trout Friendly” in and around the delicate ecosystem of the Teton River. A local organization, Friends Of The Teton River, hosts an annual “Trout Friendly” certification program for landscapers and other residents of the area. Copp explained, “I love the science behind it all,” so she sought the certification to be as well-versed in the region’s horticulture as she is in her native Fort Worth.

In fact, Sarah is an avid proponent of education and is currently pursuing a master’s degree in Ecological Restoration in conjunction with a graduate certificate in Urban Horticulture from Colorado State University, with an expected graduation in 2026. “I’m very interested in urban horticulture and can definitely see myself getting involved in it in the future, but for now, I am really enjoying residential landscape architecture. I find it so fulfilling to customize something with unique plants that are exactly what the client wants and needs in terms of beauty, implementation, and maintenance,” Sarah said, followed by what has undoubtedly become her personal and business mantra.

“I’m here for the plants.”