Name: Jill Schoenfeld

Age: 44

Type of art: Photographer and designer of miniature gardens. Owner of Wee Garden.

Web site: www.weegarden.com, www.neighborhoodnest.com.

Hometown: A native of Chicago, Schoenfeld and her family now call Willsboro home.

In addition to the Wee Garden business, Schoenfeld sells her photography through the shop and her sons sell paintings and drawings, too. The twins’ most recent accomplishment is publishing a book about the Chicago White Sox, which is for sale at the shop. “It’s a really neat business, we get to create and sell our wares from here,” she says.

All about Wee Garden: Wee Garden grows mostly out of The Neighborhood Nest on Route 22 in Essex, which is a garden, gallery and antique shop she tends to with her mother, Barbara Page. Schoenfeld credits her mother’s lifetime collection of miniatures and the family’s passion for gardening as inspiration for the business.

“The idea was planted seven years ago, when my then-6-year-old twin boys, Owen and Dustin started dreaming of building ponds, tree houses, and rolling meadows in our own backyard,” she says. “Although their dreams seemed massive, we found a way to create all of them in miniature scale.” Building on the success of their own 10-by-15-foot garden, the family started to build wee gardens in containers to sell online and at The Neighborhood Nest. While Schoenfeld sells Wee Garden kits and storybooks online and at the Nest, as well as a few other locations, she prefers to keep the business, well, small. “I’m not interested in making it a big, commercial project,” she says.

The Wee Garden offers a Web blog of ideas and inspiration featuring hundreds of Schoenfeld’s photographs and personal prose at www.weegarden.com

Inspiration: Creativity is important to Schoenfeld and her family. “The Wee Garden is in the business of growing imagination,” Schoenfeld says. “We encourage folks to dream big and grow a little. We aim to get more and more children of all ages to put down the TV remote, pick up a garden trowel, and create a small world of their own.”

What’s available:
• A shop full of garden miniatures at The Neighborhood Nest in Essex.
• A starter kit to build your own wee garden.
• A self-published photo gift book, and a line of greeting cards.

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