Pots & Plants: Local Collaboration is a Natural Fit
Written by Lia Hobel | Photos by Michael Butcher
When Karla Etten opened Etten’s Eden just outside Middleburg, she envisioned a place where plants and people could be cared for with equal attention. Three years in, the grower-driven nursery and flower farm has become a small but busy destination for shoppers, gardeners, and workshop attendees — and now, for lovers of local craft, too.
Etten’s latest addition, hand-thrown pottery by Lucketts artist Shawn M. Grove, started with a simple conversation. Grove’s wife, Rebecca, attended one of Etten’s Eden’s workshops and mentioned her husband’s work. “I had just been reading about flower farmers trying to incorporate ceramics as a different output for their business,” Etten shares. “They would do ceramics and then put floral arrangements in them. And I thought, well, that’s pretty clever.”
Curious, she made the drive to the Groves’ home studio and was inspired. “I was just floored,” Etten remembers. “It’s all meticulously designed and hand-thrown… very naturalistic. I just fell in love with the aesthetics. Then you put some beautiful bright flowers in it, or a beautiful houseplant, and it’s a lovely gift — especially for the holidays. If you’re making an arrangement, we’ll take a nice pot, and then they have something left to enjoy.”
“I had just been reading about flower farmers trying to incorporate ceramics as a different output for their business.They would do ceramics and then put floral arrangements in them. And I thought, well, that’s pretty clever.” –Etten
For Grove, the partnership is a natural fit. “My wife was just in awe about the space and place and just the energy of Karla,” he says. “She was like, ‘Man, your work would just really kind of jive with her and her space.’”
Grove’s path to pottery started in the classroom. He attended Longwood College and credits a professor there as an early influence. Today, he balances studio work with a long teaching career in Loudoun County, including 32 years in art education split between elementary and high school. Grove has also taught ceramics as an adjunct at Hood College and teaches adults at the Round Hill Arts Center, where he has instructed for more than a decade.
Grove moved to his Lucketts home in 1999 and built his kiln in 2002. “I’ve been firing every year since then,” he says. “Twice a year, we fire about 200 pots,” a process that takes “about 37 hours of constantly stoking the kiln” to reach roughly 2,300 degrees Fahrenheit — “white, white heat.” At the end of the firing, he adds salt for a traditional finish. “We’re doing salt glazing at the very end where the salt interacts with the clay body to create kind of an orange peel effect,” he explains.
Wood-firing also means surrendering control. “Everything’s one-of-a-kind,” Grove adds. “You’ve got to embrace the chaos and yield to nature — not knowing what’s going to come out of the firing.” Even with experience, the kiln’s variability shapes what he can offer. “I can’t necessarily do commissions knowing that things might not come out of the kiln,” he says, adding that the uncertainty gives him room “to explore and play and cross my fingers and hope that people enjoy what I do.”
The firings are a team effort. “It’s quite an event,” Grove says, describing a schedule that runs from “Saturday morning around 5 o’clock until Sunday” afternoon. Friends and fellow potters help with the work, including those who assist with the long overnight stoking that wood kilns demand.
“You’ve got to embrace the chaos and yield to nature — not knowing what’s going to come out of the firing.” –Grove
Grove shows and sells his work throughout the region — at the Leesburg Flower & Garden Show, on the Western Loudoun Artists Studio Tour, and in select retail spaces, including Wild West in Leesburg. Adding Etten’s Eden gives customers another way to discover his garden-friendly planters and functional pieces alongside the flowers and foliage they’re made to hold.
Etten describes Etten’s Eden as a “retirement career,” shaped by decades of horticulture experience — master naturalist, master gardener, and a lifelong grower. When building a home on the property stalled in the typical maze of engineering and permits, she turned her attention to the land itself. “I said, screw it. I’m just going to go ahead and start farming it — and I did,” she recalls. “There’s no business plan. It just sort of happened organically.”
That organic growth is reflected in how the nursery operates. Rather than buying in fully finished plants, Etten’s Eden brings in “baby plants” and grows them on-site, alongside plants started from seeds, cuttings, and plugs destined for the cut-flower fields. “We like to care for our plants. We like to baby them along,” Etten says. “You’ve got a lot of care and love that go into them.”
Pottery is a new chapter for Etten’s Eden. The young business’s early-stage growth is “only about three years old, honestly,” Etten says. Alongside the ceramics, she’s added seeds and is bringing in soils — expanding the shop’s offerings while keeping the focus on quality and an unhurried, well-tended aesthetic.
Etten’s Eden is open Tuesday through Sunday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., with later hours by appointment, and the calendar is anchored by small, hands-on gatherings. “Very intimate,” Etten says of her events. Workshops range from wreath-making in winter to spring container design, floral arranging, painting, and collaborations with local artists. An “insiders club” offers invite-only experiences, like private music, tastings, and dinners, designed to keep the atmosphere personal and art-centered.
The workshop that sparked the Groves’ connection was a late-winter favorite: a “lasagna” bulb planter layered with tulips, daffodils, hyacinths, and early bloomers like crocuses. To finish the top — still bare soil at that point — participants dress the container with moss and natural elements such as curly willow or hazel. Of meeting Grove’s wife, Etten says, “She really liked the artsy topping of the planter. She went and told Shawn about me, and I think this is kind of how we just started to connect.”
“He designs it and he does it all himself. Every piece is like a little work of art.” –Etten
For Etten, Grove’s work resonates with her own business ethos of process, patience, and craft. “You can tell the care and the thought that goes into everything that he touches,” she notes. “It takes six months… so you know that it is a quality piece when you get it.” She’s candid about price, too. “This isn’t the commercial-grade stuff you’re buying where there are molds everywhere,” Etten adds. “He designs it and he does it all himself. Every piece is like a little work of art.”
That sense of intention carries into Etten’s floral work, too. When clients need guidance, she builds a visual “storyboard” to align colors, vessels, and setting. “If you have a pot or a tablecloth, if you have a background, I’ll put it all in Canva so you can kind of see it,” Etten explains. “Then I’ll look at seasonal flowers and select what I think would be a good palette. The client can say, ‘I really don’t like that red,’ and that’s great — then I can take it out.”
To support that growing demand, Etten is building what she calls a “production cottage” — a bank-barn-style space with a dedicated floral studio below and a smaller classroom area above. The studio is designed for serious workflow, with a large walk-in cooler, restaurant-style sinks, and stainless worktables to handle event prep and workshops as the business expands.
Etten’s Eden also shows up in town, often in the form of living installations. Etten, a member of the Middleburg Garden Club and Upperville Garden Club, has decorated for seasonal events and created fall displays that later moved to the Middleburg Community Center ahead of the Middleburg Film Festival. “People loved it,” she says. “Families would take pictures in front of it.” She also builds planters for local businesses, including The Red Horse Tavern, Tilly’s Pet Supplies, and other storefronts.
If there’s one misconception Etten hopes to dispel, it’s that the shop is “too far” to visit. “We’re only literally a two-minute drive from Middleburg,” she says, noting that the property sits just beyond Boxwood Winery. With spring inventory arriving weekly and Grove’s pottery now on the shelves, Etten’s Eden is positioning itself as an easy stop for locals and visitors alike: a place to pick up plants, find a one-of-a-kind vessel, and leave with something made to last. ML
Etten’s Eden is located at 2340 Hulberts Lane in The Plains. Shawn Grove Wood Fired Pottery is located at 41718 Browns Farm Lane in Lucketts.
Published in the May 2026 issue of Middleburg Life.