MORE ABOUT THE FOUNDER
SARA SAXONBERG
Welcome to Pachamama Inspired!
I'm Sara — landscape designer, regenerative gardener, chef-turned-steward, and a mother who still makes time to stop and witness birds and butterflies work their magical show.
There's a particular kind of homesickness that has nothing to do with place. It's the ache of feeling separate from the living world — from the seasons, the soil, the web of relationships that holds everything together. I've spent most of my life trying to close that distance. That longing is what brought me here.
I grew up with soil under my fingernails and a quiet reverence for wild things. Then, like so many of us, I found myself woven into the rhythms of a city — Los Angeles, specifically — and had to learn a different kind of belonging. That tension never really left me. It became the seed of everything I do...
My first language was food.
As a professional chef at farm-to-table kitchens like A.O.C. and The Strand House in Los Angeles, I fell in love with seasonality — with the way a tomato in August tastes nothing like one in December, with the farmers who understood that difference more intimately than anyone. Through them, I began to see land not as backdrop, but as relationship.
That understanding pulled me out of the kitchen and into the field. Time working on regenerative farms — including McCauley Family Farm in Colorado — shifted something in me. I stopped preparing what the land produced and started learning how to tend it. Concurrently, through school garden programs and initiatives like Michelle Obama's Chefs to Schools, I watched something I'll never forget: a child's confidence quietly transform when their hands are in soil. That image has never left me.
I kept following the thread.
Certification as a Los Angeles County Master Gardener deepened my horticultural foundation. Naturalist training sharpened my eye for the living systems beneath the surface — the fungi, the soil food web, the migratory patterns that connect a single backyard to a continent. I began to see the land not just as something to tend, but as something to read.
But the thread that has most profoundly shaped my understanding runs deeper than any curriculum. Years of study with indigenous & spiritual teachers — especially rooted in Andean earth-based traditions and the living concept of Pachamama — have drawn me into an ever-deepening relationship with the sacred dimension of the natural world. This path isn't separate from my design work. It is its source. It is what I mean when I say the land is not a resource to be managed, but a living presence to be listened to.
Pachamama Inspired grew alongside this evolution — organically, the way most meaningful things do. What began as an edible gardening and eco-forward design practice has matured into a regenerative landscape design and education studio rooted in native plants, edible and medicinal gardens, habitat restoration, and a genuine ethic of stewardship.
The work that most fills my heart unfolds in the coastal sage scrub corridors of the South Bay and San Pedro, where I live as a resident on unceded Tongva land. Once abundant and now fragile, this habitat is home to monarchs, the El Segundo and Palos Verdes Blue butterfly, the coastal California gnatcatcher, and the cactus wren. Collaborations with local conservancies have taught me just how irreplaceable these endemic ecosystems are — and how much a single rewilded parkway or backyard can matter to the web of life around it.
I am also a licensed California C-27 Landscape Contractor (Lic. #1121337), because I believe ecological vision deserves technical integrity. A beautiful design that can't hold up over time doesn't serve the land — or you.
What I know to be true
When we tend even the smallest overlooked spaces — a parkway strip, a courtyard, a forgotten corner of a backyard — something quietly reawakens. Habitat returns. Pollinators find their way home. Neighbors slow down and notice each other. Something like wonder re-enters the picture.
As a mother, I'm reminded of this every day through my son and the joy he takes in the living world. That joy is not childish — it's essential. And it's available to all of us, right here in the heart of Los Angeles.
Whether you're hoping to make a meaningful ecological impact or simply longing for a place that feels alive and restorative, I would love to help you discover what's possible in your own landscape.
When people fall in love with their land — even a small piece of it — they fall back in love with the Earth. And with each other.
Ready to begin? Visit the Contact page to start a conversation, or explore the Events page to find upcoming workshops, walks, and community gatherings.
