The Story

The name

Wintergarten is German for conservatory — a winter garden, a room where living things are kept warm when the world outside goes cold. The word is personal. My family is German. My ancestors were shopkeepers in rural Missouri in the 1850s, part of a wave of German immigrants who built small businesses up and down this corridor. The name connects this place to that history, and to the communities they were part of.

Why plants

Houseplants saved my life — or at least the version of it I wanted to live. I spent years struggling with my mental health, and somewhere in that time I found that caring for plants pulled me out of my own head. It made me present. It gave me something outside myself to pay attention to, something that needed me and responded when I showed up. It taught me gratitude in a way nothing else had. I want that for other people. Every plant that leaves here has already been rooted and cared for. It is ready to grow.

Why baking

Necessity, then obsession. I have always loved extraordinary bakeries — in every city I visit, I find the most highly rated pâtissier and go. A macaron, a tart, whatever they are known for. That is who I am.

Then my family's allergies changed what we could eat. Dairy and gluten were out, which meant the only option in most public spaces was vegan baked goods. I hate vegan baked goods. Every one I have ever had was gummy or dry or crumbly or wrong in some fundamental way — missing the thing that makes a baked good worth eating. I say that carefully, because I have no quarrel with veganism. But a vegan brownie has never once done what a brownie is supposed to do.

The thing that was destroying the texture, I eventually understood, was the absence of eggs. Neither my family nor I are allergic to eggs. That single fact changed everything.

I got serious about baking during the pandemic — the Great British Bake Off was the spark — and I fell in love with it almost immediately, because I discovered that eggs rescue gluten-free baking in ways nothing else can. They restore structure. They restore texture. They make things rise and hold and chew the way they are supposed to. The baked goods that came out of my kitchen started reaching a point where people with no allergies at all either couldn't tell or couldn't believe what they were eating. Grown adults, licking their fingers and dabbing up crumbs.

That reaction — the moment someone takes a bite of something they thought they could never have again and just lights up — is why I do this.

What this is

Food is time travel. A good bite can take you to a moment in childhood, to the day you fell in love, to a city you've never visited. It is one of the few things that is genuinely universal. I have always been passionate about it, but I never found the part of it I wanted to do for a living — until this.

Wintergarten is a bakery and a plant shop, kept under one roof on Highway H outside Sullivan. Everything baked here is gluten-free and mammal-free, made with real eggs, and held to the standard of the best bakeries I have ever visited. Every plant here has been propagated and rooted in this house, and sent out ready to grow.

It is for the people who have been told their options are limited. They are not.