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Tag: Garden Design

  • Lessons Learned: Gardening My Rewilded Front Yard – Gardenista

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    It wasn’t a field when we bought the house in Massachusetts, but that’s what it ended up being. At first, there were massive junipers that lined the circular driveway—a presumed early attempt at formalism that had grown gargantuan due to neglect and caused frequent ice dams on our northern-facing roof by blocking out the sun. Once they were gone, it was just a barren plain, and the nakedness created by the newfound sunlight made us do what most young, dumb homeowners do: panic-buy a tree. We placed a three-inch caliper London plane slightly off-center in the giant green oval of lawn just to add some form of life, even if it was entirely too close to the house. By the time we actually knew what we wanted to do with the space, the tree had just settled into place. So, of course, we uprooted it again to its final home on the western edge of the property, and we had the clean slate we were finally ready for.

    I’m not a big fan of the term “rewilding,” not because I don’t believe in the cause, but because I don’t think that’s what’s actually being done. If I were actually doing that here, I’d let it return to woodland. Still, it’s the best term we’ve got, so it’s what we’ll use for the sake of this story. About five years ago, we lined its central axis with an allée of crabapples (Malus ‘Indian Summer’), mowed formal paths, sowed perennial seed, and got to work rewilding. While it’s still nowhere near where I’d like it to be, there are several lessons I’ve learned throughout the process.

    Photography by Nick Spain.

    Rewilding is still gardening.

    A rewilded landscape still needs maintenance.
    Above: A rewilded landscape still needs maintenance.

    I’m fortunate that most of my garden clients are curious about and open to letting some part of their property go more natural, because it will also be easier to maintain. I’m quick to tell them, however, that low maintenance doesn’t mean no maintenance. Regardless of how you go about it, whether that’s sowing seed on freshly turned earth, utilizing plugs, planting containerized plants, or some combination of all three, you will have to get your hands dirty and manage whatever you’ve installed. I find the real joy comes from the gardening style being more laissez-faire—whether that’s haphazardly slinging around lupine heads in July so they will create more stands in coming years, or knowing that I don’t have to get every single last strand of vetch out each time I weed since there are plenty of other plants it will have to compete with.

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  • ‘A Little Bit of Paradise’: A Small Backyard in Napa Valley Bursting with Beauty and Patina – Gardenista

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    Cara Davies remembers the day the city inspector came to take a final look at her garden before signing off on the building permit: “He came around the corner and he was quite surprised—and he said, ‘Oh my gosh, it’s a little bit of paradise.’” The garden shed gets the credit.

    No one would have described the .3-acre property in downtown St. Helena as paradise in 1999 when Davies and her husband, Tom, moved into the Napa Valley house. “There wasn’t much here, just a little lawn with a deck, so we completely redid the backyard,” she said. Landscape architect Josh Chandler designed the garden as well as the galvanized shed, which owes its charm both to its unusual proportions and facade of corrugated steel panels salvaged from old chicken coops.

    Photography by Mimi Giboin for Gardenista.

    Above: Chandler designed the 10-by-10-foot square shed to sit alongside Davies’ edible garden, next to the swimming pool. The shed’s unusual height–it’s 20 feet tall–and peaked roof make it the center of attention.
    Above: The shed’s siding is vintage galvanized steel panels, salvaged from a former farm with chicken sheds that dated to the 1920s. Growing next to the shed is salvia whose deep purple color is intensified by the gray backdrop.
    Above: The shed sits on a solid concrete pad etched with lines to evoke the look of pavers. A path of permeable pea gravel leads to the shed. (For more ideas about how to use pea gravel in the garden, see Hardscaping 101: Pea Gravel.)

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  • Quick Takes With: Susanna Grant – Gardenista

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    “I am a gardener, garden designer, and writer. My consultancy, LINDA, designs and plants biodiverse urban gardens that are plant-focused with an emphasis on re-using existing materials where possible. I also organise and curate London’s best plant fairs—the Spring Plant Fair at the Garden Museum and the Autumn Plant Fair at Arnold Circus.”

    Read Susanna Grant’s bio, and you’ll be able to glean a few truths about her. One, she sees herself first and foremost as a gardener, a steward of the land, a caretaker of plants. Second, spontaneity and breeziness are key to her designs, as evidenced by the fact that she named her firm after a friend’s dog. And third, she’s keen on building a community of like-minded plant obsessives. (Count us in!)

    True to form, Susanna, who wrote a book on shade planting, is also a volunteer gardener and a trustee of Friends of Arnold Circus, and a director of Care Not Capital. “I’m particularly excited by the Modern Gardener training we are delivering to trained gardeners through Care Not Capital this summer at John Little’s experimental garden Hilldrop,” she tells us. “We’ve just opened applications for the second year of our free training.”

    Below, she tells us why she’s not a fan of sedum green roofs, how to easily get rid of a lawn, which plant stars in all of her projects, and more. (And if you’re curious to see more of her projects, be sure to go here and here.)

    Photography courtesy of Susanna Grant.

    Above: Susanna at the Garden Museum plant fair. Photograph by Graham Lacado.

    Your first garden memory:

    Probably my grandparent’s garden. They had a small rectangular pond with a miniature waterfall made out of bricks that my granddad built. It was deeply suburban! I loved lying beside it watching the water boatmen bugs on the surface.

    Garden-related book you return to time and again:

    Richard Maby’s Flora Britannica and Weeds: In Defense of Nature’s Most Unloved Plants. His writing is so conversational and captures the emotional connection we have with plants alongside his scientific observations. Both really good for dipping into. Derek Jarman’s Modern Nature is another favourite—again because of the deep relationship he nurtures with his garden. We live with nature, as nature—it is not something separate. These are books you don’t have to be a gardener to enjoy and they might change your perception of the plants around you.

    Instagram account that inspires you:

    @dandelyan, @howardsooley, @coyotewillow, @bennyhawksbee, @thetemperategardener, plus @johnderian for his occasional leggy pellie [etiolated Pelargoniums] posts. Sorry, I spend far too much time on there to be able to limit it to one!

    Describe in three words your garden aesthetic.

    Above: A project that reflects Susanna’s “light touch with hardscaping.”

    Natural, kind, plant-heavy. I want my gardens to look like they’ve always been there.

    Plant that makes you swoon:

    Oenothera stricta sulphurea—it’s the way the sunset colours seep into one another and gently glow at dusk. I rarely get to use it, as most of the gardens I plant are clay and have a fair amount of shade, but I will get it in whenever I can.

    Plant that makes you want to run the other way:

    Euonymus japonica ‘Aureomarginatus’. I’m trying to like variegation more and can take a silvery edge or delicate white splash, but the yellow and green of this euonymus is too much!

    Favorite go-to plant:

    Above: At the back of this small garden, nodding Digitalis lutea.

    Digitalis lutea. She goes everywhere with me. Tough, evergreen foliage, soft yellow flowers with a beautiful little deferential nod at the tip, good seedheads, good for pollinators, good for shade, good for most gardens.

    Hardest gardening lesson you’ve learned:

    Probably accepting that gardened spaces are ephemeral. You can pour your heart and soul into a design and planting and make sure it’s cared for, but someone can come and change all of it a few years down the line.
    Maybe also stop buying plants from nurseries that I don’t need and have nowhere to put them!

    Unpopular gardening opinion:

    I’m not convinced by the current trend of drought-tolerant Mediterranean planting in the UK as a simple answer to climate change. Yes, summers are getting hotter here, but winters are looking like they are going to get colder and wetter and a lot of Mediterranean plants won’t survive that. Climate emergency means constant adaptation and there isn’t a one-size fits all.

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  • A Love Letter to Sanguisorbas – Gardenista

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    I came to gardening, as many of us do, not necessarily out of a love of the natural world but because of a fascination with flowers. In the beginning, I was attracted to those big, vulgar things so often used as a punctuation mark within a planting scheme: the bright yellow colon of hollyhock or full-stop exclamation point brought by a sunflower’s radial symmetry.

    When transitioning to garden design in my late twenties, I would occasionally send photos of floriferous encounters to my grandmother—enormous tree peony blooms at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, or creamy magnolias from my morning walk to work on the High Line. She was withering on her deathbed from Alzheimer’s, even though in my mind’s eye she will forever be crouched on her knees in the southern sun, toiling in a bed of dark pine mulch, her once-round cheeks surrounded by the acidic zing of wax begonias. The texts were sporadic because I didn’t know how to talk about dying. It occurs to me now that in sending them I was probably, on some subconscious level, hoping to fill her back up. 

    When I was studying horticulture at BBG, I had a teacher who talked about the first time he actually saw a landscape: not in the literal sense, but as a composition that was made by the sum of its parts. He spoke of how he was able to tease out the nascent forbs from the grasses, to read the silvery underside of certain pioneering shrubs and understand how they were linked to the calciferous earth below. This, I think, is what separates everyday passion from some degree of expertise: an ability to identify and confidently theorize about the minutiae working together to create a larger whole. Strangely, I can’t remember much else about the course, or even what it was.

    Clouds of Thalictrum rochebrunianum and Sanguisorba tenuifolia ‘Pink Elephant’ in late summer. Photograph by Nick Spain.
    Above: Clouds of Thalictrum rochebrunianum and Sanguisorba tenuifolia ‘Pink Elephant’ in late summer. Photograph by Nick Spain.

    With practice, that ability to zoom in on the details slowly came to me as well. I first spotted the fine, merlot-colored dots of Sanguisorba officinalis peeking out at the very back of some naturalistic garden, hidden between drifts of grass and backdropped by a shock of yellow—maybe Amsonia? I’ve long lost the image, but it’s bookmarked still in my mind, a dog-eared mental page of something I wanted to add to my own garden if and when conditions would allow. 

    Fortunately, those conditions manifested in a northwest-facing bed in my Massachusetts garden, a small strip of earth that stretches along one side of my driveway. Its aspect and location are challenging—constantly drowned beneath the dripline, baked by gravel, and receiving anywhere from two to eight hours of harsh afternoon sun depending on the time of year. During the time that had passed between that initial sighting of Sanguisorba officinalis and the creation of this bed, my rolodex of the species had grown. Sanguisorba tenuifolia, S. armena, S. obtusa, and their myriad cultivars drifted in my mind, and although not all could or would ultimately make the list, I decided to give many of my favorites a shot. 

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  • Deer-Resistant Evergreen Shrubs: 5 Favorites to Plant

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    As if gardening weren’t challenging enough, sometimes deer take up residence in your garden and decide to host a dinner party. There is nothing worse than planting a bunch of pricey new plants, only to have them nibbled down to the ground. To help you avoid this costly occurrence and disappointment, I’m sharing a handful of my favorite deer-resistant shrubs that I have tested out over the years in various gardens.

    Word of caution: Every garden is different, every deer is different, and every season is different with varying degrees of available alternate food sources—so what may be unsavory to deer in one garden may be irresistible in another. Also, when plants are young, and the leaves and stems are tender, there is a higher chance that the plant will get snacked on; as the plant matures, it becomes less desirable. If this early munching happens, a deer-repellent spray can work if applied routinely and after any rain.

    1. Coleonema pulchrum

    Above: Photograph by Hans Hillewaert via Wikimedia.

    The plant is fondly called pink breath of heaven because crushing the needle-like leaves releases a pleasant scent. That same scent is what helps ward off deer. This low-maintenance shrub grows best in sunny spots and, depending on the variety, produces either dainty magenta, white, or pink flowers. ‘Sunset Gold’ offers bright golden foliage contrasting with pink flowers. It has moderate water needs and is hardy in USDA Zones 8-11.

    1. Westringia fruiticosa

    Above: Photograph by Marie Viljoen, from Under the Radar: A Five-Star Garden in Cape Town.

    These evergreen, easy-to-care-for shrubs come in various sizes, from low to tall, and make excellent informal or formal screens, low or high hedges, and ground covers. Because Westringia is in the mint family, the leaves aren’t appealing to deer. Most bloom profusely from late winter to early summer with petite flowers ranging in color from white to light lavender, putting them also in the bee- and small butterfly-friendly category. A sunny to mostly sunny spot and summer irrigation are appreciated. Hardy in USDA Zones 9-11.

    3. Leucadendron

    Above: Leucadendron ‘Safari Sunset’. Photograph by Jean-Michel Moullec via Flickr.

    Showing off vibrant color, some even in the winter, Leucadendrons are my go-to if I want structure, more visiting pollinators, year-round interest, and amazing sculptural cut flowers. Fast-growing, drought-tolerant, and low-maintenance, these shrubs can hover around three feet, though some tower to eight or more feet. Plant in a sunny spot for best growth and color. Pro tip: Avoid high phosphorous fertilizers as this can be extremely damaging. Hardy in USDA Zones 9-11.

    4. Grevillea

    Photograph by Lady Amberelle via Flickr.
    Above: Photograph by Lady Amberelle via Flickr.

    Looking for a fast-growing shrub that pumps out curious spidery flowers that deer leave alone? Grevillea is your gal. Coming in a wide range of heights and shapes and colors, there is a Grevillea for every sunny garden. Need a low ground cover? Try Grevillea lanigera. Need a tall informal screen? Go for Grevillea ‘Red Hooks’. Oh, and these low-maintenance shrubs are also true hummingbird magnets. When planting, make sure your soil has sharp drainage. Hardy in USDA Zones 9-11.

    5. Pieris japonica

    Photograph of Pieris japonica ‘Temple Bells’ is by James Gaither via Flickr.
    Above: Photograph of Pieris japonica ‘Temple Bells’ is by James Gaither via Flickr.

    This easy shrub not only offers year-round beauty and charming dangling flowers, but also the assurance that deer will leave it alone. Plant slow-growing Pieris in a shady to partly shady spot in a mixed border, woodland, or Asian-inspired garden; smaller varieties can be used in containers. Depending on the variety, it can grow anywhere from one foot tall to 12 feet tall, and two to eight feet wide. The flowers (coming in white, pink, and dark pink) are adored by bees and hummingbirds, and avoided by deer, who view them as toxic. Hardy in USDA Zones 5-8.

    See also:

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  • Plant-O-Rama Celebrates 30 Years: Here Are 7 Ideas We Took Away from the Symposium – Gardenista

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    After a surprise snow day reschedule, Metro Hort Group hosted its 30th Plant-O-Rama last Thursday morning at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Every year, hundreds of horticultural professionals descend on BBG for this symposium, trade show, and career fair. It is the signature event of Metro Hort, a member-based organization for horticulture professionals in the tri-state area. 

    This year’s symposium included keynote speeches by celebrated horticulturalist and author James Hitchmough and Green-Wood Cemetery‘s Joseph Charap and Sara Evans, its vice president of horticulture and director of the Living Collections, respectively. The symposium closed out with a panel discussions on the topic of “Gardens: Nurturing Plants, Communities, and People” with leaders from four of New York City’s horticulturally focused non-profit organizations: Andrea Parker of Gowanus Canal Conservancy; Jennifer Beaugrand of The Bronx is Blooming; Lisa Bloodgood of North Brooklyn Parks Alliance; and Tonya Gayle of Green City Force. All of it was wonderfully inspiring.

    Here are seven ideas to steal from this annual event:

    1. Aim for hyper-diversity.

    Above: Hitchmough managed to cram an astonishing 700 plant taxa into his former garden in Sheffield. Photograph by Richard Bloom.

    Horticulturalist, author, and emeritus professor of horticultural ecology at the University of Sheffield James Hitchmough kicked off the day with a lecture titled “Evaluating the Complexity and Diversity of Designed Herbaceous Plantings.” While many American ecological horticulturalists are focused on native plants, Hitchmough is more concerned with creating “hyperdiversity” in gardens to support biodiversity. He believes species-rich landscapes that include both native and non-invasive exotics can look exciting throughout the growing season and can reduce the seasonal hunger gaps for generalist invertebrates.  

    2. Use color as a “trojan horse.”

    Above: Hitchmough’s next personal project is his 2.5 acre garden and woodpasture-native meadow in rural Somerset, where he is putting his lifetime of research findings into practice. Photograph courtesy of James Hitchmough.

    Hitchmough’s advice for persuading more people to appreciate a naturalistic planting style is to use color as a “trojan horse.” In his research Hitchmough once grew a meadow in a public park and quizzed parkgoers about their feelings about the naturalistic planting at different stages of blossom. Park goers were much more likely to admire the wilder style when it included an abundance and variety of color. Tip: One of the ways that Hitchmough achieves hyperdiversity and continuous color is by planting what he calls an “understory” to the herbaceous layer of his gardens that blooms earlier in the season. 

    3. Lean on native “weeds.”

    Evans revealed that she often finds herself choosing native plants that are considered “weedy,” like little bluestem, because she’d rather be taming an overenthusiastic native than an invasive outsider like mugwort. It’s also an extremely cost-effective tactic. Elsewhere, Evans is paying attention to volunteer plants: When Clatonia virginiana popped up in a lawn area, they roped it off from mowing and after several years of blooming and setting seed, the spring ephemeral has spread to form drifts. 

    4. Plant baby trees. Baby old trees.

    At Green-Wood Cemetery horticulturalists are doing everything they can to preserve their mature trees, including propping up limbs. Photograph by Sara Evans.
    Above: At Green-Wood Cemetery horticulturalists are doing everything they can to preserve their mature trees, including propping up limbs. Photograph by Sara Evans.

    Much of the beginning of Joseph Charap and Sara Evans’s lecture about their innovative practices at Green-Wood Cemetery was about meeting the cemetery’s canopy loss. Charap and Evans point out that, too often, as older trees reach the end of their lives, there are no other trees in line to take their place (in both domestic and public landscapes). The team at Green-Wood is planting young trees on a massive scale, mostly bareroot because they are cheaper, easier to plant, and more successful than other young trees. They are also babying their oldest trees by creating root protection zones and branch props for aging limbs. It’s a two-pronged approach that any gardener could copy.

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  • Expert Advice: 9 Tips for a Moody Winter Garden – Gardenista

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    In fall the Instagram feeds of many of our favorite gardeners, quite understandably, start to wither or move indoors. Not so that of Dutch garden designer Frank Heijligers. Indeed, much like the dames of imperial Russia, who, rather that retreating from the cold, donned furs and tiaras in anticipation of the social high season, Frank’s winter garden seemed to reach the height of its sparkling charm.

    Enchanted, we decided to ask Frank, who grows grasses, perennials, trees, and shrubs at his nursery, Plantwerk, to divulge his secrets for a successful winter garden. Here are his nine tips for adding sparkle and moody color:

    Photography by Frank Heijligers.

    Embrace black.

    Above: Now a dramatic black, the once purple cones of Agastache ‘Black Adder’ still stand tall in the frosty winter garden.

    “Successful winter gardens need a lot of plants with good structure in them,” says Frank. “The plants have to be strong and have more than one interest: nice foliage, bloom, color, seed head, change of color in fall, strong skeleton in winter.”

    Showcase long-lasting seedheads.

    Like spectators at the ballet, crowds of Monarda ‘Croftway Pink’ seedheads watch a changing fall landscape.
    Above: Like spectators at the ballet, crowds of Monarda ‘Croftway Pink’ seedheads watch a changing fall landscape.

    Fill the gaps.

    Because plants with good structure tend to bloom later, Frank notes that the successful four-season garden �220;starts with having a little more patience in spring.�221; To fill in the gap, he uses bulbs. Alliums, which maintain a sculptural seed head after they have gone by, are a good choice.
    Above: Because plants with good structure tend to bloom later, Frank notes that the successful four-season garden “starts with having a little more patience in spring.” To fill in the gap, he uses bulbs. Alliums, which maintain a sculptural seed head after they have gone by, are a good choice.
    One of Frank�217;s gardens in summer. Though lust and leafy, it still maintains a textured feel.
    Above: One of Frank’s gardens in summer. Though lust and leafy, it still maintains a textured feel.

    Consider frost-proof plants.

    A similar border garden in winter, when the regal heads of Phlomis take on a silver sheen.
    Above: A similar border garden in winter, when the regal heads of Phlomis take on a silver sheen.

    “Hosta or Alchemilla mollis are plants that look good early on in the year, but with the first bit of frost, they collapse,” Frank says. “You need plants like Phlomis, Aster, Eupatorium, Veronicastrum, and Anemone combined with grasses like Deschampsia, Miscanthus, Sporobolus, and Festuca mairei to make the garden look good until March.”

    Another sculptural favorite: Veronicastrum ‘Pink Spike.’
    Above: Another sculptural favorite: Veronicastrum ‘Pink Spike.’

    Bonus: Birds love all the leftover seedheads in Frank’s hibernal garden.

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  • Quick Takes With: Julie Weiss – Gardenista

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    Favorite hardscaping material:

    Natural local materials like nearby rocks, stone, gravel. Less carbon footprint transporting materials that are likely nearby. I love different textures used together. More plants, less hardscaping is my preference these days.

    Go-to gardening outfit:

    Above: In her Le Laboreur chore coat.

    Protective clothing from the weather. Comfortable layers. A hat. French work shirts got very trendy in the fashion world for a minute, but they are very useful in the garden because of the thick canvas fabric that plants don’t catch onto. Layers for the cold. While working in the winters at Dixter I think I had on at least 5 layers. Waterproofs are essential. I am a toolbelt person…always secateurs (mine are Japanese or Felcos for pruning), my Dixter hand trowel, a pocket attachment for a pen and notepad, a hori hori, and a hand-saw if I am pruning. And clip for my gloves.

    Tool you can’t live without:

    My Sneeborer wide trowel and Dixter designed short spade. These excellent tools are meaningful to me as I got them on my first real visit to Great Dixter, a succession planting Symposium in 2016. I had no idea I’d still be using these same tools almost 10 years later. I tend to get attached to the history of things.

    Favorite nursery, plant shop, or seed company:

    Above: Cistus Nursery in Portland, OR.

    On the US West Coast, Dan Hinkley’s Windcliff Plants (in person only, and you can visit the garden if you shop at the nursery) and Sean Hogan’s Cistus Nursery. I am so very lucky to be near and visit these 2 incredible nurseries. Digging Dog in northern California (mail order only) is phenomenal. In the UK the Great Dixter Nursery and the Beth Chatto Nursery. I love the Theodore Payne Nursery in LA (they have a large selection of California native seeds), and Plant Material in LA. For seeds: Johnny’s, Hudson Valley Seed Company,

    On your wishlist:

    Visiting the Atacama Desert and the Silk Road. Always California desert wildflower trips.

    Not-to-be-missed public garden/park/botanical garden:

    Silver Falls State Park in Oregon (for the waterfalls and native flora), Joshua Tree National Park in California. Windcliff and Heronswood Garden in the Pacific Northwest. Chanticleer Garden near Philadelphia. Great Dixter House and Garden in East Sussex.

    The REAL reason you garden:

    Above: Layered up and on the move.

    Just to be with plants and to be outside connected with the outdoors. I love trying to make something beautiful and interesting that is alive, while also providing for wildlife—that is more important than anything to me these days. And being with other gardeners is really fun. Maybe the best part. I am a team person!

    Thanks so much, Julie! (You can follow her on Instagram @julieaweiss.)

    For our full archive of Quick Takes, head here.

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  • Resolutions Roundup: Garden Pros Share the 10 Ways They’re Changing Their Landscapes in 2026 – Gardenista

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    With the start of the new year, our minds are a-swirl with ideas for what we’ll do in our gardens come spring. For inspiration, we asked garden and landscape professionals to tell us the changes they’re planning for their own gardens this year. Their answers run the gamut from ecological resolutions to fixes for eye sores, but one common thread runs through them: landscapes are always changing—and these garden pros aren’t bothered by that. They simply have to keep up and change alongside them.

    Rethinking lawn removal.

    Above: One of Evans’ students, Rosa, hosted a spring planting party; she and her friends planted plugs directly into her lawn. By the following summer, native wildflowers had filled in the entire area (seen from the opposite side, right). Photograph by Heather Evans.

    Heather Evans, co-founder of Design Your Wild, a newsletter and online community, says she’s not removing gras—even though she’ll be decreasing the amount of lawn in her new yard by more than 50 percent. “Instead, I’ll be planting hundreds of native trees, shrubs, and perennials into the existing lawn. The turf will act like mulch while the natives grow in and will eventually be crowded out by them. After trying every method of killing lawn before planting, I realize it’s often not necessary and even harmful, inviting invasives, disturbing the soil microbiome, and causing compaction.”

    Trying a new palette.

    Above: These native flowers are all on Evans’s moodboard for her new garden. Clockwise from top left: Malvaviscus arboreus var. drummondii (photograph via Texas Master Gardeners); Oenothera speciosa (photograph via Wildseed Farms); Lonicera sempervirens (photograph via Native Plant Trust); Salvia coccinea ‘Coral Nymph’ (photograph via Gardenia.net).

    Evans is also making an aesthetic change in her new Florida garden: She’s thinking in pink. “I’ll be planting species—and even cultivars!—from beyond my native range to execute my white-pink-coral floral palette,” says Evans. “I’m loving Texas natives like showy primrose, Drummond’s phlox, and pink Turk’s cap, in addition to Florida native trumpet honeysuckle, pink scarlet sage, and Pinxter azalea.” While maintaining her palette, Evans is planning to plant “two thirds for the birds” (at least 70 percent locally native species to support birds and butterflies). “I’m relying heavily on locally native shrubs and trees. I’m especially excited about white-flowering fringe tree, flatwoods plum, and Walter’s viburnum.”

    Dealing with an eyesore.

    Above: This photo shows the section of garden before Norris installed the heat pump. He says, “This project feels manageable, if not also challenging. How will we disguise this equipment without drawing more attention to it in the first place?” He plans to relocate some Joe Pye weed deeper into the border for a starter.

    The biggest change author, horticulturist, and garden designer Kelly Norris will embrace in 2026 is disguising an ugly addition to his yard: A newly-installed heat pump and exhaust vents. “It’s a reminder that home improvements, however necessary, can significantly change the experience of a home garden,” says Norris. “After lots of hand-wringing and probably much eye-rolling from our plumbers, we located it in a spot we deemed least visually consequential. It’s still a bit of an eyesore that will require reworking our prairie border, but the upside is that the old A/C condenser unit is no longer in our outdoor entertaining area.”

    Learning a new skill.

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  • Jo Thompson’s ‘The New Romantic Garden’: Design Ideas to Steal From Her New Book

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    All week, we’re revisiting the most popular stories of 2025, including this one from March.

    Anyone who knows British garden designer Jo Thompson’s work will not be surprised by the title of her book, The New Romantic Garden. Over the decades that Thompson has been working as a designer she, has always created atmospheric gardens with a softness and sense of atmosphere and mystery. The 30 gardens that fill the book show how a modern romantic aesthetic can be applied anywhere—from a tiny city garden to the meadows of a country estate. Thompson’s text is delightfully laced with romance, too, with references to fairies, sun goddesses, and Narnia.

    Benton irises and roses mingle in this romantic London garden designed by Thompson. Photograph by Jason Ingram.
    Above: Benton irises and roses mingle in this romantic London garden designed by Thompson. Photograph by Jason Ingram.

    The “new” in the title reflects the fact that while Thompson’s work may feel nostalgic in some regards (there are many an English rose in this book), it is firmly of-the-moment. A longtime advocate of organic gardening, Thompson designs to support biodiversity and soil health, which are on all gardeners’ minds today. There’s also a looseness and a naturalness that will appeal to fans of the new perennial movement and more naturalistic styles. This book is a fresh perspective on what a “romantic” garden is today.

    Photography courtesy of The New Romantic Garden by Jo Thompson (Rizzoli).

    1. Start with the story.

    Romantic and natural, this garden has a real sense of place and to whom it belongs (writer Justine Picardie and her husband, Philip Astor). The wildflower meadow of mostly native grasses is peppered with a few nonnatives to extend the season of pollen and visual interest. Photograph by Rachel Warne.
    Above: Romantic and natural, this garden has a real sense of place and to whom it belongs (writer Justine Picardie and her husband, Philip Astor). The wildflower meadow of mostly native grasses is peppered with a few nonnatives to extend the season of pollen and visual interest. Photograph by Rachel Warne.

    For all of her designs, Thompson develops a story for the garden based on her clients’ desires and the place itself. For Thompson this involves “beating the bounds of the place and really getting to grips with the space,” plus trying to understand its history and what might have been there before. But she says, storytelling can be a delicate dance. “You want to avoid creating a pastiche,” she cautions. “If I’m working with a Tudor cottage near Canterbury, I’m not going to create a little Tudor medicinal garden, but there might be elements, like medicinal plants within the planting.” Likewise, Thompson says she trusts her intuition not to take a garden too far from its roots.

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  • Garden Designers Harry and David Rich’s Cottage Garden in Wales Is Like a Fairytale

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    All week, we’re revisiting the most popular stories of 2025, including this one from May.

    A transportive garden can owe as much to a magical setting as to the plantings. At the garden of brothers and award-winning garden designers Harry and David Rich, the surrounding landscape ramps up those feelings before a visitor even sets foot in the garden. Nestled deep in Welsh woodland, this is a fairytale cottage fully immersed in nature—including roving herds of sheep—where access is possible only by bridge over a stream, a tributary of the River Wye.

    The atmospheric garden is one of 18 featured in my new book Wonderlands: British Garden Designers at Home, in which I explore the private spaces of leading landscape designers, revealing how their own homes become testbeds for their professional projects; these are spaces for the slow evolution of ideas, schemes, and plant combinations, as well as private idylls where they can retreat from the world. Some are grand projects created over decades, but many, like Harry and David’s cottage garden, are hands-on gardens created with limited resources in the past few years.

    Photography by Éva Németh.

    Above: A run of pleached crabapple trees dissects the space and creates a link from the building to the garden.

    Harry relocated from London to the secluded cottage just north of the Brecon Beacons in Wales, where he now lives with his wife, Sue, and their two children. But the garden has always been a shared project between the two brothers, who together became the youngest winners of a gold medal at the Chelsea Flower Show in 2012, when Harry had just formed his landscape architecture firm and David was still at university. They went on to create two more gardens at the show, winning another gold medal in 2014.

    Above: Plantings are taken right up to the cottage walls, increasing the sense of full immersion in greenery.

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  • Quick Takes With: Richard Hayden – Gardenista

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    Piet Oudolf designed a set of long-handled hand tools, a spade and a fork. They’re perfect for when you’re working on your knees, but need more leverage than the normal hand spade can provide. They’re especially good for digging and dividing grasses and more stout perennials. https://sneeboer.com/en-us/hand-forged-garden-tools/piet-oudolf-hand-spade

    Go-to gardening outfit:

    I usually wore cargo shorts and a long sleeved camp shirt, but that was in California. Wearing that on this coast, where I keep running into mosquitos and poison ivy, I’ve had to really reduce the skin exposure. And of course a holster for my left-handed Felco pruners and my soil knife.

    Favorite nursery, plant shop, or seed company:

    I love Hudson Valley Seeds. They’re currently growing a variety of eco-type native pollinator perennials sourced to the Hudson Valley. I think it’s important to plant those local natives when you can.

    On your wishlist:

    Above: Jasper enjoys my roof terrace on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Potted plants include: Karl Foerster grass, calibrachoa, sedums, and geraniums. Photograph by Richard Hayden.

    A garden of my own! I have a little roof space with my New York City rental apartment, where I grow some herbs and a couple of really resilient grasses and pollinator plants. It’s a brutal environment to be gardening on an asphalt roof on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Plus it’s six flights up, so I’ve really resisted my urge to add pots and plants. But it’s fascinating to see all the pollinators that show up even on a random roof in the middle of the city!

    Not-to-be-missed public garden/park/botanical garden:

    On the East Coast, I love Mt. Cuba Center in Delaware. It’s a former estate garden, but planted with all natives in a very thoughtfully designed way. They also do amazing research on various perennials in their extensive trial gardens. On the West Coast it’s Lotusland, another former estate garden in Montecito near Santa Barbara, CA. Just a crazy, fantastical mix of palms, succulents, cycads, and cactus arranged in the most impressive way.

    The REAL reason you garden:

    Above: Photograph by Liz Ligon.

    Because plants are the basis of all life on Earth, and I believe that creating and caring for gardens are, therefore, the highest form of art and interpretation that you can achieve. To create opportunities for human emotion and connection while supporting our endangered wildlife is the noblest of callings.

    Anything else you’d like us to know? Future projects?

    We’re renovating a garden on the High Line between 17th and 18th Streets that was impacted by nearby construction. Piet Oudolf designed a brand new planting scheme that will add 18 new plants to the High Line. We planted this in mid-November.

    Thanks so much, Richard! (You can follow him on Instagram @naturegardener.)

    For our full archive of Quick Takes, head here.

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  • The Beauty of Decay: 10 Perennials to Add Structure to a Winter Garden – Gardenista

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    As gardens fade and the days darken, it’s tempting to forget about what’s going on outdoors until early spring when everything jolts back into life. But this is a missed opportunity. Careful plant choices can reap major benefits in the winter.

    It’s well known that certain trees and shrubs can play a leading role in the coldest season, but the right perennials and grasses also can look mesmerizing. By focusing on a plant’s structure and its ability to retain its shape, you can create schemes that look incredible in the fourth season. Read on to discover which plants will maximize this effect and learn to embrace the beauty of winter decay:

    Thistles

    Thistles in February. Photograph by Feathering the Nest via Flickr.
    Above: Thistles in February. Photograph by Feathering the Nest via Flickr.

    Spiky plants and thistles including teasel, echinops, and eryngiums tend to hold their structure brilliantly in the winter.

    Echinops

    Globe echinops. Photograph by Tobias Myrstrand Leander via Flickr.
    Above: Globe echinops. Photograph by Tobias Myrstrand Leander via Flickr.

    In winter, the stiff purple-blue heads of echinops turn brown and maintain their posture.

    Grasses

    Grasses and perennials in December at Torrey Pines Nature Reserve in La Jolla, California. Photograph by Anne Reeves via Flickr.
    Above: Grasses and perennials in December at Torrey Pines Nature Reserve in La Jolla, California. Photograph by Anne Reeves via Flickr.

    Play off these strong forms with billowing clumps of airy grasses such as Deschampsia cespitosa or Molinia caerulea which will fade to blond and buff colors over late autumn and early winter.

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  • Jake Hobson’s Garden: A Tour of the Niwaki Founder’s Mini-Forest Backyard

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    Jake Hobson is a master pruner. He’s written two books on pruning: Niwaki: Pruning, Training, and Shaping Trees the Japanese Way and The Art of Creative Pruning: Inventive Ideas for Shaping Trees and Shrubs. And he’s the founder of Niwaki, a Japanese-inspired garden tool company headquartered in England. So, it should come as no surprise that his home landscape in Dorset is full of artfully shaped, precisely pruned shrubs and trees. But it isn’t your usual English garden with clipped hedges—nor is it a replica of Japanese gardens.

    “Everything I do is inspired by Japan, but I’m deliberately not making it all Japanese,” explains Hobson. “There’s no koi pond or red bridges.” Not only does Hobson eschew any decorative Japanese elements, he avoids ornaments altogether. “For me, a Japanese garden is creating a sense of a landscape—an idealized landscape—within the plot. If you bring in ornaments, you ruin the magic of scale. Whereas, if all you’ve got is plants, you can create a sense (if you squint and after a couple of drinks) that maybe you’re looking out into a deep forest.”

    Hobson has successfully created this illusion of landscape within his small space. Looking out the windows of the home he shares with his wife, Keiko, and their son, or gazing at photographs of Hobson’s green, layered garden, it’s hard to believe that it’s not much bigger than a tennis court. 

    When Hobson and his wife bought the house, the backyard had four sheds, a mismatched bunch of overgrown conifers, and a ton of concrete paths. They ripped it all out, leaving just the evergreen hedge that blocks the view from a neighboring building. Hobson commissioned a local carpenter to build a single new shed inspired by a Japanese “summer house” at the back of the plot. Then he planted dozens of evergreen and coniferous shrubs and trees that he has been training and pruning for the last fourteen years. The result is a garden that feels like its own miniature world, full of living sculptures.

    Let’s take a tour of Hobson’s garden, which he photographed himself. (You can follow him on Instagram @niwakijake.)

    Every year Hobson lets the grass grow long and mows a new path through it. “Zigzagging through the garden is a really Japanese thing,” he notes. “You never just go straight into a house.” At right are some of Hobson’s undulating boxwood and a Phillyrea latifolia, which Hobson calls a “cloud-pruned tree.” (He had been growing it for years at his parents home before moving it to the garden.)
    Above: Every year Hobson lets the grass grow long and mows a new path through it. “Zigzagging through the garden is a really Japanese thing,” he notes. “You never just go straight into a house.” At right are some of Hobson’s undulating boxwood and a Phillyrea latifolia, which Hobson calls a “cloud-pruned tree.” (He had been growing it for years at his parents home before moving it to the garden.)

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  • Lessons Learned: The Misadventures of a Former City Slicker and Her Cut Flower Garden – Gardenista

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    Cut flower garden. This is a sub-category of garden that, if you had asked me about three years ago, I wouldn’t have even understood, let alone imagined someday having. But three years ago, when we moved from New York City to eight-plus acres in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and set about not only caretaking but working to improve the gardens that were now part of our domain, our super-gardener friend Stephanie declared in a tone that conveyed obviousness, even inevitability, “Well, of course you’ll have to plant a cut flower garden.”

    For the uninitiated like myself, a cut flower garden is like a vegetable garden but for flowers—not for decoration but for service. I suppose that more elaborate cut flower gardens are meant to service florists or weddings or even roadside stands. But in our case, our cut flower garden services our dining table and our bedside tables and my desk and anywhere else we need that bump of indoor summery joy around our home. 

    Fast-forward to a year after Stephanie’s suggestion and, indeed, we planted a cut flower garden—resplendent with zinnias, cosmos, dahlias, bells of Ireland, snapdragons, gomphrena, purple hyacinth beans, and more. But there was a problem: Cut flowers are supposed to grow tall—for, ahem, those big tall giant vases that we don’t have—and that means you have to support the plants. And the way that most people create cut flower garden supports, according to our gardening friends as well as the internet, is with a combination of heavy green garden stakes and twine. You pound the garden stakes into the ground at regular intervals, say, three to four feet apart, and then wind twine between the stakes so that you end up with a series of twine boxes with Xs crossing diagonally. Do this lower to the ground and higher up along the stakes and, Bob’s your uncle, that’s that.

    Except Bob is apparently not my uncle, and the twine grid method, for me, wasn’t that easy or workable for three reasons. First, as a baseline, I’m not fantastically skilled at winding or tying twine in such a way that it stays taut and in place. So what initially looked like a sharp twine outline of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich expertly cut into triangles by a very anal retentive parent on school lunch duty inevitably looked, just a few days later, like said sandwich had been left at the bottom of a knapsack for weeks. Second, it never looked good. Even where I occasionally managed to get the twine taut, the giant green metal stakes stood out like sore industrial-ish thumbs pocking the landscape of the otherwise lovely natural-looking flowerscape. And third, hard though it had been to achieve this deeply imperfect twine-stake situation—and, indeed, I had spent hours setting it up—I was gutted by the realization that I’d have to eventually take it all down. And then do it all again next year. And so on and so on. Ad infinitum. Forever.

    All this effort for something that didn’t work, that looked garish, and would require repeating every single year?  Nope. And this is why I built a series of custom flower support grates and bases for them to rest on. Here’s how I did it.

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  • Lu La Studio Turns a Parking Lot Into a Multi-functional Rewilded Garden in Somerville, MA

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    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

    The gray-on-gray view of the parking lot from the street.
    Above: The gray-on-gray view of the parking lot from the street.
    The yard behind Brunelle’s home was nothing but asphalt and a few conifers.
    Above: The yard behind Brunelle’s home was nothing but asphalt and a few conifers.

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  • Cues to Care: How to Design Ecological Gardens that Look Neat and Tidy

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    This is part of a series with Perfect Earth Project, a nonprofit dedicated to toxic-free, ecological gardening, on how you can be more sustainable in your landscapes at home.  

    “What does aesthetics have to do with ecology?” asks Joan Nassauer. Turns out a lot. A professor of landscape architecture at the University of Michigan, Nassauer has been studying how to make ecological gardens more acceptable and accessible. Several decades ago, she coined the phrase “cues to care,” which has now become a catch phrase among ecological gardeners. (Read her paper “Messy Ecosystems, Orderly Frames” and a recent review paper “Cues to Care: A Systematic Analytical Review”.)

    Cues to care are the key indicators that a landscape is intentional and being looked after. Think: mown turf; visible, unimpeded windows; and prominent, recognizable flowers. Most people find these things comforting. “We want to affect human-dominated landscapes to protect and increase biodiversity, increase their capacity to store carbon, and ensure human comfort with rising temperatures,” says Nassauer. But the key to acceptance and success lies with our ability to “create landscapes people are happy to inhabit.”

    The size of your property does not matter. Every bit of land can make a difference. “The 1/4 acre or even 1/8 acre is in some ways the most important, because from the standpoint of a seed, or a pollinator passing by, or a migrating bird being able to stop and rest, these small pieces all contribute to a larger matrix that is the functioning landscape,” says Nassauer.

    As more people learn about the dangers of conventional landscaping with its toxic lawns and “ultra-processed plantings,” as Perfect Earth founder Edwina von Gal calls them, they’re discovering the benefits of a healthier, looser, chemical-free approach, where lawns are diminished, native plants replace unsustainable ones and are allowed to grow freely, and dead trees or snags are celebrated as sculpture. Cues to care become an important bridge linking the wildness of nature with the intentional. Nassuer notes that cues to care are “not universal, but culturally contingent.” Experiment on your own property, talk about them with your neighbors, and take some cues from these ecological designers who share with us how they show they care.    

    Incorporate straight lines and right angles. 

    Above: In her garden on Eastern Long Island, von Gal created geometric beds and filled them with an array of native plants that she lets grow freely with wild abundance. Photograph courtesy of Perfect Earth Project.
    Above: In her garden on Eastern Long Island, von Gal created geometric beds and filled them with an array of native plants that she lets grow freely with wild abundance. Photograph courtesy of Perfect Earth Project.

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  • What to Plant on a Hill or Slope: The Experts Share Design and Gardening Tips

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    A steeply pitched lot can present a challenge for even the most seasoned garden designer. Many resort to terracing the slope to create flat ground to work within, but moving that much earth is expensive–and it deeply disturbs the site. We spoke to three garden designers who created diverse gardens on very sloped sites to learn how they handled this particular challenge. Below, these experts share their best tips, from figuring out what plants will thrive to how to keep the soil in place during establishment.

    Use a “cover crop” to prevent erosion.

    Because of heavy invasive weed pressure, Refugia planted only grass species in the first phase of this project. This included seeding a mix of fine fescue and annual rye, before planting warm-season ornamental grasses like big bluestem, switchgrass, and little bluestem. Once weeds were under control, they added flowering perennials. Photograph by Kayla Fell, courtesy of Refugia Design.
    Above: Because of heavy invasive weed pressure, Refugia planted only grass species in the first phase of this project. This included seeding a mix of fine fescue and annual rye, before planting warm-season ornamental grasses like big bluestem, switchgrass, and little bluestem. Once weeds were under control, they added flowering perennials. Photograph by Kayla Fell, courtesy of Refugia Design.

    When reimagining a residential sloped yard in Pennsylvania, Refugia Design Build first removed overgrown shrubs and a ton of invasive English ivy, leaving a lot of exposed earth. Knowing that preventing erosion would be key in the first year, they strategically seeded a mix of fine fescue and annual rye. “The annual rye served as a fast-germinating winter cover crop—a temporary tool that allowed us to get almost instant erosion control while waiting for the fescue to germinate and the rest of the plantings to be completed,” says landscape designer Amanda Branum, who was the design lead for this project. Branum notes they cut back the rye before it went to seed the following spring.

    Pay attention to root structure.

    California-based landscape designer Fi Campbell says she focussed on plants with “distinguished roots,” to hold the soil on the slope of a residential property in Los Angeles. In her climate, that meant native bunch grasses and Muhlenbergia (muhly grass), which have deep root systems. Campbell also used ground covers like creeping sages and coyote bush for stabilization. Shrubs, including toyon, manzanita, and various different buckwheat, help anchor the garden. Tip: Prairie Moon Nursery includes images of root structures for all the seeds and plants it sells, if you need help visualizing roots.

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  • Quick Takes With: Michael P. Gibson – Gardenista

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    Recently, we published a story on the trend toward more naturalistic-looking shrubs in garden design, but Michael P. Gibson’s Seussian topiary art may singlehandedly stem that tide. Michael is a renowned  topiarist based in Columbia, SC, who has an undeniable way with shrubs, mostly evergreens, which he shears and prunes into delightfully otherworldly forms. The son of a hairstylist (his mom) and an artist (his dad), he seems to have inherited their talents, alchemizing them into a skillset that’s entirely his own.

    Michael and his work, particularly his role in restoring Pearl Fryar’s Topiary Garden, have been featured in the New York Times, Garden and Gun, Magnolia and Moonshine, as well as podcasts. He was even a contestant on HGTV’s topiary competition reality show Clipped, with Martha Stewart as a host. “I have many projects coming up, but one I’m really excited about is next spring with The Rose Kennedy Greenway in Boston, MA, creating topiary sculptures from existing mature boxwoods,” he tells us. “I’m also in the process of working on my first book.”

    While you wait for that book to be released, here’s a peek into his topiary-obsessed brain.

    Photography courtesy of Michael P. Gibson.

    Your first garden memory:

    My first garden memory is, when I was around five, being fascinated watching my dad meticulously trim the shrubs around the yard into perfect geometric shapes. I was determined to learn and started clipping by age seven.

    Garden-related book you return to time and again:

    The Art Of Creative Pruning by Jake Hobson is a game-changer, highlighting pruning styles from around the world. The Night Gardener by Devin and Terry Fan (my kids love this children’s book). Topiary by Twigs Way.

    Instagram account that inspires you:

    Anyone posting about topiary! @topiarycatblack always has creative ideas. @amir_topiary_vrn is doing amazing work. And @hedgelover_ does a great job at showcasing topiary inspiration from around the world.

    Describe in three words your garden aesthetic.

    Refined. Imaginative. Peaceful.

    Plant that makes you swoon:

    Ilex aquifolium ‘Argentea Marginata is a gorgeous, variegated holly with creamy yellowish green leaves. The new growth emerges with pinkish margins. A beauty in any landscape.

    Plant that makes you want to run the other way:

    That’s easy: Berberis thunbergii. Not a fan of the thorns. Although I’ve created some interesting shapes, I would not recommend for topiary. This was actually the very first shrub I clipped.

    Favorite go-to plant:

    Evergreens make the best topiary, so I tend to stick to Ilex varieties, with Ilex vomitoria being one of my favorites. Grows nice and dense and can be sculpted like stone.

    Hardest gardening lesson you’ve learned:

    Always follow the vein of the branch when doing inner pruning to make sure you make the right cut and not pruning away a large amount of foliage. Also, avoid pruning in the rain or even after heavy rain, branches will be weighed down and will spring up when dry, potentially messing up your design.

    Unpopular gardening opinion:

    You can get a smoother, more refined look to hedges by avoiding swaying the hedge trimmer back and forth and just brush in one direction. Just like brushing hair. Changing directions in the right areas will make it look like shadows or shading.

    Gardening or design trend that needs to go:

    Planting the wrong shrub or tree too close to a building structure. Do research on the plant before planting to understand growth habits.

    Old wives’ tale gardening trick that actually works:

    Pinching buds will actually help encourage the side shoots to grow, allowing a denser plant.

    Favorite gardening hack:

    Pruning up a tree can add not only more space, but also prevent anyone from hiding behind it. That’s called the 3-6 rule. Keep smaller shrubs below three feet, and limb up branches to at least six feet on taller trees.

    Favorite way to bring the outdoors in.

    During the holidays, I find rosemary, lavender, or lemon Cypress shrubs from a local nursery that are around a foot in height and clip them into small table-top topiaries like spirals to have around the house.

    Every garden needs a…

    Focal point to draw visitors in. Consider topiary, a living sculpture that will enhance any space and continue to impress as it matures. Every garden should have at least one topiary.

    Tool you can’t live without:

    Tobisho Topiary Clippers allow me to use hand shears like a pencil. Feels like Edward Scissorhands, or a barber adding the final details.

    Go-to gardening outfit:

    Moisture wicking pants and long sleeve shirt, a safari hat, Gamecock neck gaiter, nitrile gloves, and Sketcher boots.

    Favorite nursery, plant shop, or seed company:

    Reese’s Plants in Columbia, SC, is my go-to nursery. A unique plant shop I recently visited was Elizabeth Stuart in Charleston, SC, which has a little bit of everything in their showroom and nursery.

    On your wishlist:

    Tobisho Shears from Niwaki.

    Not-to-be-missed public garden/park/botanical garden:

    Fellows Riverside Garden in Youngstown, OH; Earlewood Park in Columbia, SC; Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park in Grand Rapids, MI; and Wave Hill Public Garden & Cultural Center in Bronx, NY.

    The REAL reason you garden:

    Incredibly therapeutic to work in nature daily, especially for someone that grew up with ADHD. I have a true passion for beautifying public spaces with topiary and creating peaceful more loving spaces for all.

    Thanks so much, Michael! (You can follow him on Instagram @gibby_siz.)

    For our full archive of Quick Takes, head here.

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  • The Wave Hill Chair: Minimalist, Timeless—and You Can Make It Yourself! – Gardenista

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    When Remodelista founder Julie Carlson attended a benefit dinner at Wave Hill, a public garden and under-the-radar treasure in the Bronx, she enjoyed the beautiful plantings and the breathtaking views of the Hudson River, but it was the garden chairs she saw on the property that bowled her over. (She is a design geek, after all.)

    Turns out, the Wave Hill chairs have been bewitching visitors for decades. They were designed in the 1960s by landscape designer Lester Collins, who based the chair on a 1918 design by architect Gerrit Rietveld; Collins later allowed Wave Hill to make his version of the chair for use in their public garden.

    Good news for Julie and others who can’t stop thinking about them: Wave Hill sells DIY  plans for the chair.

    Above: The beauty of these chairs is that you can use cheap store-bought planks to build them and paint them in the color of your choosing. To purchase the plans, contact The Shop at Wave Hill at 718.549.3200 x249, or email [email protected].
    Above: Horticulturalist Dan Benarcik designed his own version after becoming obsessed with the chairs at Wave Hill. On his site, he sells the plans for his chair for $35; a DIY kit with all the materials you need for $325; a workshop to make a chair for $350; and a fully assembled chair, in western red cedar, for $425. Find details here.
    You can also purchase pre-made Wave Hill chairs in your choice of wood—white ash, white oak, walnut, cherry, red oak, reclaimed oak, reclaimed pine, maple, or cedar (pictured) from Hugo and Hoby.
    Above: You can also purchase pre-made Wave Hill chairs in your choice of wood—white ash, white oak, walnut, cherry, red oak, reclaimed oak, reclaimed pine, maple, or cedar (pictured) from Hugo and Hoby.
    Above: While we like the look of the untreated wood chairs that age with time, we also quite enjoy them painted or stained (Margaret Roach writes about her painted versions here). Photograph via Dan Benarcik.

    For more on garden chairs, see:

    N.B.: This post was first published July 2019; it has been updated with new links and photos.

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