Floria absolutely loved her work, but absolutely hated telling others about it. When pressed by folks who didn't yet know her, she would say she was a gardener. It wasn’t even a lie, not really. It was just a more expansive definition of a garden than her people generally used.
After the collapse, the remnants of local communities had really taken to heart the need to stop living off the land and start living with the land. Generations later, this cultural shift had brought with it a deep mistrust of mechanical and electrical technology.
It was a slippery slope, the argument went. Machines by definition allowed you to do more work than one person could, extracting more from the environment than the community could give back. That way lay a race to death: overpopulation, ever-increasing exploitation of the land to support unsustainable growth, and the eventual descent into resource hoarding, scarcity, and war.
Yet there were still machines her community simply could not yet do without, the sources of light and heat on which they were forced to rely because of how thoroughly those who came before had fucked up the sun in their quixotic quest to harness every watt of energy. "Sustainable energy", they'd called it, with no regard for what sustainable usage might look like.
Floria understood why her people resented the need for these machines, and she too, felt that rage at their ancestors for stealing away the heart of the solar system. But the machines themselves, she found utterly beautiful. The synchrony of their actions, the slow and elegant rotation of the mirrors throughout the course of the day, a waltz of gargantuan proportions.
In her mechanical garden, Floria fertilized the plants with oil and pneumatic fluid, watered them with current data about the state of the land and the needs of its flora and fauna, pruned the broken ones to repurpose parts for repairs, and harvested their fruit in the continued survival of the land. So she said she was a gardener. It wasn't a lie, not really.