Gwen Stefani can’t quite believe it: She’s turned into her parents.
“When I was young, I’d walk home from school and see my mom in her shorts doing her gardening, and my dad would be cutting the trees and make me pick up the branches. I’d be like, ‘I’m never having a tree at my house,'” she recalls.
Yet these days, when she and her husband Blake Shelton are at their home near Tishomingo, Oklahoma, the rocker tends to far more than just a lone tree.
They have sunflowers. Zinnias. Even plots of corn. “I just had the most incredible dahlias ever,” says Stefani, 53, beaming as she describes herself as a “garden flower nerd” after her PEOPLE cover shoot in Los Angeles. “When we get to Oklahoma, we’re constantly working — and it’s a different kind of work. It’s probably what my mom was doing back in the day, and now I get it!”
Stefani — who wed Shelton in 2021 — still feels surprised by the decidedly un-Hollywood turn her life has taken in the past decade.
“I didn’t see any of this coming with Blake. This was just a big old ‘What?’ It was an amazing gift to experience love like that for the first time,” she says of falling for the country superstar, 47, and his down-home life after meeting in 2014 on the set of The Voice.
“He’s changed my life … when I [started dating] Blake, that’s when I felt home, like, ‘Oh, this is where I’m supposed to be, with this guy.”