Growing up in a family of horticulturalists in flower capital Aalsmeer, van Staaveren has always been drawn to plants and greenery. The omnipresence of the garden has resulted in an intimately intertwined photography and gardening practice, in which the garden serves as a laboratory for both photographic and botanical experiments. The literary concept Locus Amoenus (Pleasant Place) is central to her practice. It describes a remote and idealized garden hide-out that functions as a landscape of the mind. 

To van Staaveren, gardening and photography are surprisingly similar: gardener and photographer move along the same scale of control, with observation on one end and intervention on the other. Equipped with pruning shears and camera, van Staaveren cultivates green paradises of her own. Both physically, in the family garden in Aalsmeer, as well as in her photographic and spatial works.