The depaving movement has become something of a national sport in the Netherlands, with municipalities competing to see who can remove the most paving from their town each year. Stateside the crusade to replace concrete and asphalt with permeable landscapes (ideally: gardens) may be slower to take hold, but it’s been around for nearly two decades, starting with Depave Portland in Oregon and spreading to communities across the country.
In Somerville, Massachusetts, Depave Somerville organizes “depaving parties” for homeowners. Landscape architect Sara Brunelle, one of the founders Lu La Studio, was selected for one of these volunteer-run events. So, one April day, an asphalt recycling dumpster and a crew of about 10 volunteers showed up to tear up the parking lot behind Brunelle’s house with crowbar and sledge hammers.
Brunelle and her business partner, landscape designer Katie Smith, had dreamed up a new permeable landscape for the yard, but they didn’t anticipate how gratifying the actual depaving would be. “It was truly joyful—like the best of a CrossFit gym and an awesome wild community,” says Brunelle. “It really was electric. Katie and I both have a background in urban gardening. This was an awesome moment of direct action.” It was also a little emotional: It began to rain right after the depaving was complete, and they realized the soil had not felt rain for at least 70 years. “That smell of rain on earth was so poignant,” Smith says. “That’s our responsibility as landscape architects to rehabilitate.”
Brunelle and Smith’s goal was to create a multi-functional, re-wilded garden for all the residents of the multi-family building. They managed to fit in an eating area, a play lawn, a permeable parking space, and a vegetable garden on the 30 feet by 40 feet lot.
Photography by Haley Dando, courtesy of Lu La Studio.
Before
Above: The gray-on-gray view of the parking lot from the street. Above: The yard behind Brunelle’s home was nothing but asphalt and a few conifers.
This is part of a series with Perfect Earth Project, a nonprofit dedicated to toxic-free, nature-based gardening, on how you can be more sustainable in your landscapes at home.
Rashid Poulson probably wouldn’t be where he is today if he hadn’t gotten bored at work. The horticultural director of the Brooklyn Bridge Park (BBP), one of the city’s most exciting new parks and our newest Pathways to PRFCT Partner, had zero interest in gardening when he was studying engineering in college. But when the hours dragged during his job as a cashier at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s former gift shop, he found himself reaching for the gardening books to pass the time, and “caught the bug.” His mother, a BBG gardener, suggested he apply to New York City’s Million Trees horticultural training program. A few weeks later, while working near the West Side Highway tackling invasive porcelain berry vines and trying to avoid poison ivy, he had an epiphany. “I remember how refreshing the air was, the exposure to the sun, and the interesting cast of intercity youths who were brought together to tackle these daunting plants draped over canopies of oaks and many other mature trees,” he recalls. “In that moment, everything I was doing felt right and purposeful. I was contributing to the world I live in.” He had found his calling.
Above: Poulson is the director of horticulture at Brooklyn Bridge Park. “With changing hardiness zones, it’s a challenge to navigate the layers of new information, and then turn that information into appropriate action. For example, do you water a struggling tree during drought? Or do you accept it as the larger reality of climate change in that say 30 years from now, this tree might not be able to survive in this particular range or microclimate of New York City?” Photograph by Alexa Hoyer.
After completing the program, Poulson became an intern at the High Line for a summer before joining the team at BBP in 2012. He’s been there ever since, rising through the ranks—from seasonal gardener to director of horticulture in 2022. Designed by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, BBP encompasses 85 acres on the Brooklyn waterfront and features freshwater wetlands, flower meadows, woodlands, and salt marshes—all maintained organically and sustainably. Poulson shares how the gardeners tackle weeds, the native plants that make his heart sing, and more.
Photography by Rashid Poulson, unless noted.
What’s the horticulture team at Brooklyn Bridge Park up to right now?
Above: Poulson at work.
We just kicked off irrigation in the park, which is big for us because after nearly a decade, managing turf is back under the horticulture department. We will be experimenting with incorporating clovers into a few of our small lawns to see where we can reduce our inputs into over 11 acres of turf areas throughout the park. We aim to expand on this as much as possible with larger lawns.
We are eager to dive into the spring planting season. There are some new Carex plantings (Carex radiata and Carex greyi) adjacent to lawns that I am certain will be successful. These plantings grow under trees like Metasequoias (dawn redwoods) and Taxodiums (bald cypresses) that provide ample shade along lawns, where full sun turf grasses are unable to establish. This will likely serve as a model for us to add a variety of native plants that could straddle the lawns in areas that are typically mulched pits and will function with lower maintenance inputs and will have fewer resources applied. And of course, they will heighten the aesthetics of the area.
What are some of the tasks/practices that you are doing now in the garden?
The name of the game this time of the year is staying on top of the weeds ahead of summer. We’re trying a new method this year: a radial approach [to weeding]. Imagine a 10-foot x 10-foot area, where you’ll find things like Gallium, nettle, and then a bunch of mugwort forming in the middle. The instinct might be to run straight for the mugwort and pull it, especially considering how aggressive it is. But you really want to start at the perimeter, the furthermost perimeter of your weed populations and subtly work your way in. This way we can boost our thoroughness and effectiveness, as well as have as delicate a footprint as possible. When you are utilizing those radial approaches, you allow the eye to prioritize a little bit better. Once you’re done, you’ve also essentially closed off that situation and prevented the spread of these hot pockets of weeds that we have throughout the park.
This is part of a series with Perfect Earth Project, a nonprofit dedicated to toxic-free, nature-based gardening, on how you can be more sustainable in your landscapes at home.
“Mother nature is the ultimate landscape designer. We’re just her helpers,” says Emilia deMauro, who, along with her sister Anna, runs the East Hampton, NY, landscape design firm deMauro + deMauro. Their approach to design is imbued with a sense of community and responsibility to preserve the beauty of the native environment.
The sisters grew up shuttling between the rolling hills of rural Northeastern Pennsylvania, where their artist dad lived, and the farm fields and overgrown thickets of the east end of Long Island, where their mother was farming and gardening. “Both of those landscapes play a huge part in our designs,” says Anna, who studied at the Florence Academy of Art in Italy. “There’s something so beautiful in the wildness. We’re constantly pulling from those memories.”
They found kindred spirits in architect Nick Martin and his wife Christina. The couple believed strongly in “pivoting away from green lawns that require chemicals and continual labor, and, most important, that strip our community of habitat for creatures big and small,” says Christina. They hired the sisters to design the landscape outside of Martin Architects, Nick’s new Bridgehampton office on the Montauk highway. A busy thoroughfare, situated just past a gas station and across from a bank, didn’t deter them from achieving their joint vision: a self-sufficient oasis, lush with native plants and alive with birds, butterflies, and wildlife, that looks beautiful year-round.
Photography by Doug Young, courtesy of deMauro + deMauro, unless otherwise noted.
Above: For the meadow in front of Martin Architects, the deMauros devised an interspecies matrix planting. They densely planted small perennials (grasses like prairie dropseed and wavy hair grass, and flowers including slender blue iris, gray goldenrod, and white heath asters) approximately 12 to 18 inches apart to help with weed suppression and water conservation.
The property was neglected when the Martins bought it. “To transform the space, we removed the asphalt driveway, regraded the land because the pitch was so bad, with the goal that it wouldn’t need irrigation,” says Nick. He also tried to reuse as many materials as possible.
What if your driveway were beautiful? If you have a typical American stretch of asphalt for a driveway, this question might come off as an absurd provocation, but Andrea Hurd, the founder of Mariposa Gardening & Design, has proven over and over that a beautiful place to park your car is possible. Her Bay Area firm uses their expertise in stonework and horticulture to create driveways that are an attractive addition to the landscape. Hurd’s interest in reimagining driveways doesn’t stem solely from aesthetic ambitions, though.
Trained in permaculture, Hurd worked with the San Francisco League of Urban Gardeners in the 1990s. There, she learned that the water that runs over your driveway picks up oil and gas that has leaked from cars. “That polluted water goes into storm drains that go straight to the Bay,” says Hurd. One solution to manage this problem is to replace conventional driveways with permeable ones, which allow stormwater to be filtered through the soil, keeping pollutants out of natural bodies of water.
The benefits of a permeable driveway don’t end there. By keeping rainwater on a homeowner’s property, the water soaks into the ground to recharge the groundwater table. Ripping out concrete can also reduce theheat island effect, as concrete reflects the sun’s heat. And if you add plants to your new permeable driveway, you can create habitat for pollinators—not to mention improved curb appeal. Perhaps best of all? Your newly beautified driveway can be used as garden space when your car is not parked there.
Here’s what you need to know to create your own beautiful, permeable parking spot:
Photography by Saxon Holt, unless otherwise noted.
Remove the concrete.
Above: Before and after—Mariposa Gardening & Design replaced this concrete driveway in Berkeley with a permeable design that created room for many new plants, including a mixture of creeping thymes and native strawberries.
The first step to creating a permeable driveway is to remove non-permeable concrete or asphalt surfaces. Unless you’re handy with a jackhammer, this is probably a job for a pro. “Hopefully you have a driveway that was built to code, which means you’ve got a sufficient amount of base material underneath the concrete pour,” says Hurd. But if that is not the case, your contractors will need to regrade the driveway so that water slopes away from the foundation of the house.
This is part of a series with Perfect Earth Project, a nonprofit dedicated to toxic-free, nature-based gardening.
“A seed contains the past and the future at the same time,” said the poet and writer Ross Gay, in a recent interview in The Nation. Hilltop Hanover Farm, a Perfect Earth Project partner in New York’s Westchester County, understands this firsthand. Through their native plant seed initiative, they are preserving the past by cultivating the plants that have been growing on this land for millennia, while sowing a resilient and biodiverse future.
Native plants have become a buzzy topic in recent years, and not just for their good looks. People are beginning to understand how vital they are to a healthy and robust environment. But to provide the greatest benefit, restore depleted lands, and give insects, birds, and other animals the food and habitat they really need, we must look beyond the plants that are native simply to North America, and be sure to include species local to our specific regions.
Above: Showy goldenrod (Solidago speciosa) is one of the keystone species Hilltop Hanover grows in production. This fall-blooming beauty can reach six-feet in height and is a favorite of birds, who love to eat their seeds.
Hilltop Hanover is doing just that, led in their work by Adam Choper, the farm’s director, and Emily Rauch, the native plant programs manager. The farm is part of a new group called Eco 59, a seed collective formed to grow and collect valuable local natives of the Northeastern coastal zone (ecoregion 59) for conservation and restoration in Westchester County, and to preserve them for the future through the Northeast Native Seed Network. “We’re working together as a collective to figure out supply chain issues, find out where the gaps are, and find a way to get the seed out into the world,” says Choper.
Above: The farm crew helps harvests seeds of coastal plain Joe-Pye weed (Eutrochium dubium) by hand.
When Susan Nock, a garden designer based in Wellesley, Massachusetts, launched her business Thistle eight years ago, she didn’t set out to specialize in container gardens. “I just started doing them for fun. It’s like creating a little vignette, and I love them nestled in a garden or in front of a house.” Over the years, custom container gardens became a signature service alongside her regular garden design work. “I plant containers for all four seasons, and I love to have a fall container for Thanksgiving,” says Nock, who tells us there’s still plenty of time to design planters for the tail end of fall.
Here are her tips for late-autumn container gardening:
Photography by Susan Nock.
Plant a variety of leaf shapes.
Above: Nock likes to include a mix of textures and leaf shapes, including loose and wavy grasses and carexes, and trailing plants like ajuga and ivy.
“The number one thing to think about with container composition is making sure you have lots of different leaf sizes, shapes, and textures,” says Nock. “You want to clearly see the different plants against each other, like cabbage next to grass.”
Pick frost-tolerant plants.
Above: Ornamental kale and cabbages are frost-tolerant.
For fall planters, Nock relies on ornamental kale and cabbages, mums, and pansies, all of which will endure some frost. She likes to use tall grasses in her fall containers, too, noting, “Even when they are dormant they will look beautiful.” Nock also recommends weaving in evergreen elements now, with an eye toward reusing them in your winter containers. “You can put in a boxwood now and use it for the next season,” she says. Ditto on cypresses and English ivy, which she uses as a trailing element in containers, where the famously invasive plant can be kept in check.
Elevate those mums and cabbage.
Above: Nock proves that ornamental kales and cabbages can look super-sophisticated in a variety of compositions, including a bouquet-like design (left) and a nearly monochromatic pot that features solely shades of green (right).
While Nock is pulling from a very conventional fall plant palette, she uses these plants in unexpected ways. “Mums and cabbages can easily look a little old-fashioned,” she cautions. The key to making them look modern, she says, is massing. “We’re not used to seeing them massed in great big groupings.” Another tactic is to work in a tight color palette for a monochromatic effect. With cabbages, she says to look for ones with “fun shapes and textures.” And she says, “If you tuck mums in with other plants, as just one element in the container, they work better. They don’t look as stiff next to flowing grasses or spilling ivy.”
Shop the perennials sale.
Above: Perennials like heucheras and grasses have a place in planters.
Most nurseries have their perennials discounted right now, which Nock says you might take advantage of. In addition to perennial grasses, Nock looks for heuchera (“I love them all!” she enthuses) and carex, which she uses as a flowing, softening element in her designs. When you take apart your fall planters, you can plant these in the ground (even if it’s a little crunchy) and use them in the garden, or keep them in the containers for another arrangement.
Upcycle your pumkins.
Above: Reuse your Halloween gourds by tucking them into a container arrangement.
If you’ve got pumpkins and gourds left over from Halloween, re-home them to your planters (and if you don’t, these are likely to be on sale now). Nock especially likes to seek out interesting varieties and shapes and tuck them into the container among the plants. “They become just another texture in the design,” she says. Steal her trick to get them to sit where you want (and avoid rotting): Prop them up on an empty plastic pot from the nursery, which you can conceal with foliage or preserved moss.
Get creative when the pickings are slim.
Nurseries are often picked over come November, so “if you are not finding all the plants you want, tuck in Spanish moss or sheet moss for a fun texture,” says Nock, noting that independent nurseries and farm stands are more likely to have plants this time of year. Consider pinecones, lotus pods, and even some dried hydrangeas to fill in any holes.
Don’t forget to water!
Above: Nock will continue to water her planters until average daytime temperatures are reliably in the 30s.
“It’s really important to water in the fall,” advises Nock. “Yes, you have the irrigation shut off, but it is essential to keep pots watered going into the cold season. The more hydrated plants are, the more they can endure cold and frost.” Nock doesn’t stop watering until the daytime temperatures are consistently in the 30s, which is also when she brings her terracotta pots indoors.
