Why RedLeaf Ranch Creator Brian Brigantti Left New York City for a Farm in Rural Tennessee

The 15-acre RedLeaf Ranch in Morrison, Tennessee, is more than 800 miles from New York City, and Brian Brigantti doesn’t plan to return to the grind of city life ever again.

He doesn’t need to. He has everything he needs: his partner Domonick Gravine, a sustainable garden, farm cats, a couple dogs and a handful of chickens — including Olive, a flashy rooster who rules the roost at RedLeaf.

“Looking back now and how life is now, moving here was the best decision I’ve ever made,” Brian said.

City to Country: A Timeline

Brian, a self-described city boy, grew up in Chicago and lived in San Francisco before moving to New York to pursue modeling and photography. New York is where he met Domonick, who already had a growing carnivorous pitcher plant business in the city that desperately needed more space.

Dom moved to Tennessee in 2018 to expand his business while Brian stayed in the city. After continuing their relationship long-distance for a year, Brian made the move to Tennessee permanently in 2019, but he did return to New York for a week each month to work as a photographer — a skill he still uses on the farm.

In March 2020, Brian was in the middle of his 80-mile journey to the Nashville airport on his way to New York when something in his gut told him not to get on the plane. Instead, he turned around and went back to Morrison. It turned out to be the right decision — the city shut down within days for the pandemic and the world followed soon after.

“So it was a great time to start gardening, especially growing food with how uncertain the food supply was gonna be in the next few months," Brian explained on HGTV’s Townsizing Podcast. "And now … it's my full-time job. I live it now."

The following summer, in 2021, he started sharing videos from the farm on TikTok, and his following exploded. By the end of the summer, he had 1.3 million followers. A book deal came in 2022.

The book, Gardening for Abundance, is so much more than a how-to on planting. In addition to practical gardening tips — there are chapters on planning what to plant, starting seeds and maintaining the garden — the book is full of thoughtful commentary on how to create abundance in all parts of your life, the beauty of connecting with nature and the value of resting in the winter after the harvest is done.

“It’s been a gift to write this book and see how it impacted people’s lives,” Brian said.

Brian’s family and friends were a bit skeptical when he announced his plans to give up modeling for work boots and a straw hat.

“Everyone was like, ‘What, are you serious?’ ‘Are you sure?’ ‘Are you OK?’ ‘Do you need to see someone?’” Brian joked.

He trusted his instincts. The pace of the city was wearing on him, and he knew he needed something different in his life. Recently, his mother also became a full-time Tennessean, and she is regularly featured on TikTok helping Brian turn his harvests into delicious meals like kimchi and potato and leek soup.

What's Growing at RedLeaf Ranch

The crops at RedLeaf Ranch include garden staples like tomatoes, squash, corn, potatoes and peppers, but there are also Indian snake cucumbers, purple cauliflower and Chinese cabbage. With time, Brian has chosen his favorite tools to make working on the farm a bit easier.

It’s a lot of work to tend the plants, especially when it comes to dealing with a lack of rain and garden pests, but Brian says there’s value in nurturing and growing food that will in turn nourish you.

“You’re building a relationship with plants when you work with them in that way,” he explained.

The tomatoes are his favorite edible plant in the garden, but he also loves wildflowers — milkweed and echinacea specifically — and the native plants that help make up the ecosystem on the farm.

A farm wouldn’t be complete without a few animals, and Brian keeps a small flock of chickens headed up by a sassy rooster named Olive, who has a special knack for crowing in the middle of filming TikTok videos.

Brian and Dom also have two dogs — Chloe, a heeler, and Bruno, a cane corso mixed with Bouvier. Bruno is often seen lounging in the background as Brian harvests the veggies. And, of course, there are farm cats.

“They’re a great part of our ecosystem,” Brian said.

The cats — Kitty, Merlin and Winston — keep the property free of rodents. Kitty, who came to the farm with Domonick in 2019, has also taken to rural living and settled in as the matriarch of her corner of the animal kingdom.

“Nobody messes with Kitty,” Brian said.

As for Domonick’s plants, RedLeaf Exotics continues to thrive, and the pair recently completed construction on two large greenhouses to give them more space to grow the rare plant species that Domonick has been learning to cultivate since he was a child. They both use the name RedLeaf — red is Dom's favorite color, and it was fitting that both of their ventures use the same RedLeaf branding.

Buyers searching for these rare, carnivorous plants come from all over the country to purchase them from Domonick. There are roughly 180 species of pitcher plants, which are native to Southeast Asia. They differ from the most famous carnivorous plant — the Venus fly trap — in the way that they catch their prey. Fly traps snap shut on insects and then secrete a digestive juice to consume it. Pitcher plants are shaped like pitchers filled with a digestive juice. Insects fall into the pitcher and are consumed once inside.

The abundance that Brian and Domonick experience on the farm is evident all around them, and Brian says he is content on the farm in a way he never was when he still lived in cities.

“Gardening has done so much for me on, like, a spiritual and intrinsic level than anything I’ve ever pursued has,” Brian said.