About
Chris Chung
Horticulturist, educator, and author. Gibsons, BC.
“Plenty of people can style a doorstep. Far fewer can read the ground it stands on.”
The training
Chris Chung is a garden consultant and author based in Gibsons on BC’s Sunshine Coast. Originally rooted in Vancouver, she trained at UBC Botanical Garden, where she later served as Program Coordinator and an instructor for the Horticulture Training Program.
Bringing together rigorous technical training and an ecological approach to design, Chris specializes in multi-purpose plantings that transform and shine through the seasons. As an Organic Horticulture Specialist, she works with clients to cultivate intentional spaces that are practical, productive, and supportive of living systems.
Before horticulture
Four Seasons Hotel Vancouver
Chris spent her early career at the Four Seasons Hotel Vancouver — first in Room Service, looking after guests in the hour after check-in, tired and hungry and newly arrived; later as the hotel’s renovation coordinator, overseeing the installation of furniture, fixtures, and equipment through the lobby, the restaurants, the corridors, and the guestrooms and suites.
That work was measured in details nobody is meant to notice consciously: how a tassel hung from a chandelier above the escalator, whether a lamp frame threw an odd shape across an occasional table.
Guests never itemize any of it. They simply feel looked after.
It is the same instinct she brings to a threshold now, and the reason she is comfortable telling a host curating a five-star stay that the most overlooked few feet of a property are worth the attention. It is also, more often than not, where the photographs happen — arriving or leaving, people gather at the front door for the picture, and a threshold that reads the season becomes the backdrop of the keepsake.
The practice now
Fluent Garden is the narrower expression of all of it: a single practice, Terra + Vasa, devoted entirely to the threshold — the arrival space that sets the tone for everything past the door.
Training & credentials
- Trained at UBC Botanical Garden
- Former Program Coordinator & Instructor, UBC Horticulture Training Program
- Author, The Layered Edible Garden
- Organic Horticulture Specialist
Appearances & talks
Vancouver Master Gardeners’ Spring Seminar, gardening clubs, virtual garden festivals, and workshops.
Grow layered gardens
The Layered Edible Garden
Written to bridge ecological forest systems with residential garden design, The Layered Edible Garden explores how stacking vertical plant layers creates productive, low-maintenance spaces that support local wildlife while enriching everyday life.
Elsewhere
Join me and 140,000 gardeners on Instagram.
Begin
Tell us about the entrance.
Where it is, who arrives there, and what bothers you about it now. Photographs of the approach help more than anything. We’ll reply with next steps and a time for the walk-through.