Buckled beside me in the passenger seat of my car is a little pink pot, overflowing with succulents from Kris Norvell of It’s a Beautiful Life Succulent Gardens.
Kris had given it to Rebecca, and I was merely the courier, entrusted with getting it home safely.
That was the mission.
Beforehand, I asked how Kris how to keep it alive.
“Neglect them, Christian,” she told me. “Succulents thrive off neglect.”
Finally, I thought, horticulture with reasonable expectations.
Little did I know how emotionally attached I would become.
First you learn their names. Then their Zen-like personalities feel like a favor worth returning.
Out of gratitude, I spent hours each day neglecting them: repurposing studio LEDs, scheduling a sixteen-hour timer, dropping the thermostat to simulate cooler desert night conditions. I even played Bach’s Cello Suites through a Bose speaker to stimulate their growth.
When one of them slipped from the bowl during watering, I nearly lost it. Rebecca called the sound I made “crime-scene worthy.”
I had fallen hard for succulents. So naturally, I called Kris to learn why.
The Desert Places
A very long time ago, when the earth was still becoming itself, some plants had an important problem to solve:
How do I survive the desert?
Most didn’t.
But across continents and unrelated plant families, a few began doing something remarkable. Leaves thickened. Stems swelled. Skins toughened against heat and loss. And then the succulents discovered a secret to survival—a secret that Kris Norvell herself would spend much of her life discovering by another name.
Born Christy Lynn Reed in Iota, Louisiana, Kris grew up in Cajun rice country, in a town so small, she jokes that “it had neither a McDonald’s nor a Waffle House.”
Her grandfather farmed rice, then flooded the fields for crawfish. Kris remembers playing among the cut stubble and floating across those flooded acres in tractor-tire inner tubes.
At eight, Kris moved with her single mother to Mandeville. Her mother struggled with mental illness, and Kris went to work young to help support them. By eighteen, she was living independently while finishing at Fontainebleau High School. Theater gave the pressure somewhere to go. In Charlotte’s Web, she was cast as Templeton, the rat, a decision teenage Kris initially received as a personal insult until she discovered how many scenes he had.
“I am afraid. I am nervous. I just do it anyway,” Kris says of the courage those years demanded.
Kris married at nineteen. Her son, Brian, arrived while she was still in college. Four months later, in July 2005, she woke to discover a heartbreak that split her world into before and after: her husband had passed.
Kris was twenty-three.
A month later, Katrina came ashore.
For a few weeks, people had rallied around the young widow. Then, as Kris puts it, “the world blew up.” Suddenly everyone was navigating displacement, FEMA trailers, heat, darkness, and homes they could not return to.
But Brian was still there. “This little innocent boy relied on me to get up and be my best self,” she said.
She Was My Person
By forty, Kris had survived long enough to wonder whether survival was the same thing as living.
She moved into a little rental, brought home a basset hound named Cletus, and began spending evenings on the back porch with her hands in potting soil.
“I did so much healing with my hands in the dirt,” she says. “It made me feel restored.”
The plants had become a place for Kris to heal. Before long, they would become a way to love the person who had always loved her best.
Her name was Jackie.
Aunt Jackie had been a gardener all her life. When cancer made the yard too much, Kris arrived with roughly thirty succulents, several pots, and a confession:
“I need some help, Aunt Jackie. I did a thing.”
Aunt Jackie was too weak to plant that day, so she sat at the kitchen table and directed while Kris worked.
Soon, succulents filled the room. The garden had simply moved indoors.
One of their final conversations happened on Aunt Jackie’s patio, surrounded by the plants they had come to love together.
“She was my person,” Kris says. “The only person I felt growing up who I felt unconditional love from.”
“That’s all it takes, right? Just one person to believe in you. One person to tell you you’re worth it. You’re lovable.”
It’s a Beautiful Life
Aunt Jackie did not want winter to have the last word.
“I don’t want a sad funeral with mourners in the cold of the winter,” she told Kris. “Please wait and do a celebration of life in the spring when the flowers are blooming.”
So they waited for spring.
Kris created succulent arrangements and named them for the woman they loved: Jackie’s Strength and Jackie’s Grace. Photographs of Aunt Jackie stood among the plants, and everyone who came left carrying a succulent of their own.
Years later, Kris still finds them.
“I’ll go over to people’s houses sometimes and see their little Aunt Jackie succulent,” she says. “It just makes me smile.”
By then, something else had begun growing.
The business had already begun, almost accidentally, while Kris was caring for her on hospice. During the hours Aunt Jackie slept, Kris started sharing succulents online. A website asked for a business name.
Her first thought was It’s a Sucky Life.
No, no, no. That is not the message, she remembers thinking. Circumstances are sucky, but it’s a beautiful life.
It’s a Beautiful Life Succulent Gardens was born on Aunt Jackie’s couch while she rested in the next room. Their first kitchen-table photograph now sits beside Kris in the potting studio.
“I get to tell her good morning,” she says. “It’s almost like we’re in there together.
The Secret of Succulents
“Succulents survive the desert not because they need nothing,” Kris tells me on the phone. “They survive because they know how to receive what comes, hold it close, and carry it through the dry places.”
Long before she understood how much she carried, Aunt Jackie had given Kris something no desert could manufacture: unconditional love.
Now that love keeps moving outward.
“It’s going to be ripples forever,” Kris says.
In homes scattered far beyond her potting studio, little Aunt Jackie succulents are still growing, carrying something of her into another spring.
And back at my house sits the little pink pot I once buckled carefully into the passenger seat, a gift intended for Rebecca.
I thought my job that day was simply to carry it home.
Maybe the succulents knew better.
We receive what is given. We hold it close. And when the time comes, we carry it forward.
Turns out, I was carrying more than a gift for Rebecca. I was carrying something of Aunt Jackie home with me, too.
And perhaps, the secret that the succulents discovered so long ago will be the key to our own survival as well.
Rooting (Sidebar)
Kris’s next chapter is taking root just across the state line.
The Rooted Retreat, planned to open in spring 2027 at 23380 Leetown Road in Picayune, Mississippi, will bring It’s a Beautiful Life Succulent Gardens under one roof. The climate-controlled space will include a nursery, potting studio, workshop area and room for gatherings.
Visitors can browse ready-made arrangements, individual plants, pots and Kris’s premixed soil, or sit down for a private potting session and learn as they plant. Kris also plans workshops on succulent care, arrangement design and specialty plants such as desert roses, along with rare varieties she carefully sources.
Rooted is meant to reach beyond plants. Kris invites wellness practitioners and teachers will use the space too, creating a place where people can gather, learn and heal.
Would you like a little desert of your own? Kris creates custom arrangements for gifts, homes and workspaces. Call 225-328-6602, email Kris@BeautifulLifeSucculentGardens.com, or follow @beautifullifesucculents on Instagram for inspiration and details.