Chicago native, Sara Gasbarra, is the founder of VERDURA, a bespoke garden design company which cultivates culinary gardens for private residences in Nashville and Chicago and provides consulting services nationally.

Sara specializes in creating a season-long garden plan specifically tailored to the needs of a home kitchen, sourcing unique and flavorful varieties of vegetables, herbs and ornamental and edible flowers. Her goal is to create a vibrant garden space that is functional, thoughtful and beautiful. She frequently partners with landscape architecture firms to seamlessly integrate the vegetable garden into the overall design of property’s exterior spaces, paying close attention to each client’s style and aesthetic.

Sara began her career designing kitchen gardens for prominent chefs and restaurants including Locust, Henrietta Red, Bastion and The Catbird Seat in Nashville and Floriole, Park Hyatt, Palmer House Hilton and Smythe in Chicago. Her work has been featured in several publications including Food & Wine, HGTV, Martha Stewart Living, Saveur, Eating Well, Eater National, Chicago Tribune, Nashville Scene and Gardenista.

In addition, Sara has presented and lead talks for organizations such as The Culinary Institute of America, Taste Talks, Slow Food USA, IDEO, Google, Chicago Ideas Week, DIFFA and Soho House. She also designed and implemented a culinary garden for the 2023 Southern Living Idea House.

Prior to founding VERDURA, Sara founded the auxiliary board for Green City Market, Chicago’s largest, year-round farmer’s market, serving as its chairman for four years and launched her green career overseeing the market’s The Edible Gardens, a premiere 5,000 sq. ft. educational vegetable garden run in partnership with Lincoln Park Zoo.

She has also served as Vice President for Slow Food Chicago's Board of Directors.

Sara’s passion for cultivating edible green spaces can be traced back to childhood memories spent gardening and cooking with her Italian father. Her favorite vegetables to grow for her clients include sungold tomatoes, eggplants in every shade of purple, african blue basil, romanesco summer squash, zinnias and dahlias. She also loves to cook from her garden and has spent the last several years mastering the art of pasta making.