Lindsey Taylor: An Interview with the Garden and Floral Designer

We’ve enjoyed garden designer Lindsey Taylor‘s way with both words and flowers since 2013, when she was a contributor to this site. Recently, we admired her rambunctious cinderblock garden, teeming with tough, hard-wearing beauties, in Newburgh, NY, where she’s based. And just this past fall, we were captivated by her new book, Art in Flower, which collects 40 of the elegant floral arrangements she designed for her monthly Wall Street Journal column, “Flower School.” Each composition is paired with a famous work of art, as well as a short explanation of how the masterpiece inspired her design. It’s a telling conceit: For Lindsey, plants are her paints, and the garden, her canvas.

Her chosen medium is 3D and multi-sensory. “I once visited a garden designed by a very famous designer I like. I couldn’t figure out why I felt so uncomfortable in it until I realized that even though everything was blooming, there was no sound. No buzzing of insects or birds,” Lindsey recalls. “I later found out the client insisted on having the garden sprayed for bees (they are allergic), ticks, and mosquitoes. It was claustrophobic to be in and devastating to experience such a great landscape of pollinator plants in silence.”

Below, a portrait of an artist as a garden designer.

Photography by Lindsey Taylor, unless noted.

Your first garden memory:

Picking daffodils with my Granny at their farm outside of Toronto. Narcissi and the many varieties to grow are really a favorite, particularly species and ones with finer foliage.

Garden-related book you return to time and again:

The Secret Garden by Francis Hodgson Burnett, and The Education of a Gardener by Russell Page.

Instagram account that inspires you:

To name a few, John Little’s @grassroofco; Peter Shear’s @petershear; Edwina von Gal’s @perfectearthproject; and Dan Pearson’s @coyotewillow.

Describe your garden aesthetic.

A garden needs to have a soul. It needs to move in the wind, change, have fragrance, feed the birds and other insects and critters, and breathe. When I visit a garden where too much control and need for perfection is in play, I find it unpleasant to be in. If it’s sprayed or watered to stay alive, or if it’s at odds with its environment, I’m not interested. All plants, of course, need a helpful hand with watering and weeding to get established in the first few years, but my goal is to let them sort it out happily on their own once they’ve settled in.

Currently in my own garden I’m healing the land from a recent building construction project. My objective is to merge the line between the cultivated and the natural areas and have the house sit quietly as if it were dropped from the sky and nestled in. I’m working with the existing soil, planting tightly to avoid bringing in mulch and using only wood chips from dead trees we had to clear on the property.

Plant that makes you swoon:

Plants with fragrance. Plants that sway in the wind. Vertical plants that tower up through a dense planting. And plants that feed the birds who bring their precious song to a garden.

Plant that makes you want to run the other way:

Japanese knotweed and other invasive aggressive bullies.

Favorite go-to plant: