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.)
Susanna Grant is a garden designer and co-director of Care, Not Capital, with the irrepressible John Little (we wrote about him here). With help from “lots of excellent gardeners and ecologists,” they offer a free program that helps to equip trainees with the skills needed for “modern gardening.” Susanna explains: “The main idea is shifting the emphasis and some of the budget away from hard landscaping and infrastructure towards planting, habitat creation—and gardeners.”
This little yard in North London was transformed by Susanna for like-minded clients, who had already successfully campaigned with their Islington neighbors to get the local authorities to install some planters on a sad stretch of sidewalk, which they described as a “disused piece of pavement.” They asked Susanna to make a wildlife garden there; then asked her to help them with their own disused backyard.
Above: A lot of plants and a consistent palette in the hardscaping make a small space seem bigger. “It was a tough brief as the owner wanted interesting plants: lots of planting plus room. I think it shows what you can fit in a space.” Above: “The back garden is tiny, north-facing and quite boxed in,” says Susanna. “It backs onto flats, and rather than try to pretend they weren’t there, I wanted to ensure the view from the house focused the eye on the planting—not up and beyond.” Above: “The client wanted interesting plants,” continues Susanna. “Although my scheme was predominantly quite woodland because of the aspect, there was an existing banana, nandina domestica and acer palmatum which I needed to work around. I added an Abutilon ‘Canary Bird’ right next to the house as it flowers for most of the year and picks up on the vibe of some of the existing plants.”
File this under Seemingly Antithetical but True: The tinier the outdoor space, the more verdant it should be. “We find that minimalist garden strategies work well on large, vast spaces, while smaller gardens are more conducive to wild, exuberant approaches,” says David Godshall of LA- and San Francisco-based landscape architecture firm Terremoto. “Therefore, in this small space, we got wild.”
The garden in question belongs to architect Fredrik Nilsson of Studio Nilsson, a neighbor and friend of David’s, and was, when the pair began, “mostly just dust,” David remembers. Construction had just wrapped on the compact, architecturally forward LA house Fredrik designed for his young family, and the remaining space on the lot was tight—some of it set at an incline. Still, the family “wanted to make the most of it. They have a young daughter and wanted to spend family time together outside as well,” David says.
Creating the feeling of an oasis, even in a busy urban environment, was key. “Through conversation and walking onsite together, we realized we want to create privacy from the street, and thus we planted jasmine to intertwine with the steel fence and make the garden smell wonderful,” says David. A mix of native California flora, low-water plantings, places to lounge, and artfully hardscaped paths complete the pocket-sized escape.
Join us for a look at this garden that’s every bit as lush as it is compact.
Photography by Caitlin Atkinson, courtesy of Terremoto.
Above: The house, designed by Fredrik, is set on a petite lot. When Terremoto took on the project, David remembers, “Fredrik had designed the concrete aspects of the hardscape, and those were in place.” Fredrik had also designed the powder-coated wire-mesh fence: “It’s designed to allow vines to grab hold and take over with time while still preserving a visual connection to the street and into the property,” he explains. “The fence facing the two neighboring properties is cedar planks. It has the same materiality as the house but untreated, allowing it to weather over time.” Above: Tiered gravel steps lead to a small sitting area. “The planting plan is really a mix of native Southern California species and low-water regional species as well,” says David. “The garden is as much for local insects and wildlife as it is for the family.”
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.
Strike one: a house in need of a major renovation. Strike two: a garden in need of love. Strike three: a remodel that left the surrounding landscape decimated. Such were the conditions that Emilia and Anna DeMauro, the sisters behind DeMauro + DeMauro Landscape Design & Gardens, encoutered when they first met with their client in North Haven, a hamlet north of Sag Harbor, New York. “When we came on the property, it was essentially a construction site,” remembers Emilia. “It really was just exposed earth—just dirt. And further back it was so overgrown in some areas it was difficult to even walk.”
With a main house, a barn, a pool and a pool house, the two-acre property was not quite a blank canvas. There were also mature oaks dotted across the property, which abuts both woodland and wetland. In addition to repopulating the landscape with native plants, the client, an avid cook and gardener, hoped to add vegetable and cut flower beds (she also wanted to keep the peach trees planted by the previous owner). Last, the client wanted to highlight several sculptures by her late husband.
To tackle the large project, the DeMauro sisters created distinct gardens within the property, including two pollinator gravel gardens close to the house, a wildflower meadow near the wetland, grassy meadows on either side of the driveway, three cut flower beds, and fourteen vegetable beds—plus, on-site composting and even a chicken run.
Take a tour of the revived and diverse bayside landscape:
Photography by Doug Young, courtesy of DeMauro + DeMauro.
Before
Above: Before the landscape redesign, the land surrounding the house was nothing but compacted, post-construction dirt. Anna saw the sunny spots between the two house wings as the perfect opportunity to create a dry gravel garden inspired by Beth Chatto’s celebrated garden in Essex.
After
Above: Two years after DeMauro + DeMauro’s installation, the pollinator gravel gardens are coming into their own.
In just two weeks, Gardenista: The Low-Impact Garden lands in bookstores! We are so appreciative of all the interest the book has already generated. As a thank-you, our publisher is offering a 20-percent discount when you pre-order our book from their site (use code: GARDENISTA20) before October 14.
And if you need further enticement, here’s another sneak peek from the book: a tour of an inspired residential garden in Australia that takes its cues from the coastal national park right next door.
Fiona Brockhoff grew to love the Mornington Peninsula’s wild ocean landscape as a child on vacation. When the renowned landscape designer built her family home here, the style was a nod to 1950s beach shacks—powered by solar panels and rainwater. Her garden is rooted in ecological resilience.
Fiona’s love of native plants stems from long acquaintance, aided by her love of bush walking (or hiking) and camping. The house, named Karkalla after an indigenous coastal plant, and which she shares with her partner and extended family, sits on a strip of land that has the ocean on one side and Port Phillip Bay on the other. “It’s quite a harsh environment—it’s very windy and the soil is sandy,” explains Fiona. “The decisions we made were not just about the layout of the garden and the hard landscape elements. A lot of the plants that I chose were those I’d seen when I’d been walking in the Mornington Peninsula National Park, adjacent to our property.”
The provenance of materials is as local as the plants: “The gravel comes from a nearby quarry, and a lot of the timbers are from a jetty that was renovated when we were building the garden.” Walls of regional limestone anchor the house and garden and are the continuing work of stonemason David Swann, Fiona’s partner, whom she met on the build.
Fiona focuses on “appropriate planting” rather than lecturing people on the rights and wrongs of natives versus non-natives. When a client asks for bamboo and miniature maples to go in a Japanese-style garden, she asks them to go back a step and think about what it is about a Japanese garden that attracts them. Is it the simplicity and the restricted number of plants and elements in that kind of garden? If so, she suggests creating that feeling using local, indigenous plants.
City people on the Mornington Peninsula can bring with them a Melbourne mentality, thinking that constant vigilance is required in watering and general fussing over plants. Fiona tells clients that unless they are growing vegetables, this is not necessary. “It’s more about allowing those plants to be themselves. They don’t require a lot of maintenance because they’re mainly indigenous, or they’re a good ecological fit. Yes, there’s some pruning, and the gravel needs a bit of raking, but on the whole, it’s about working with nature.”
Above: Sea box (Alyxia buxifolia, foreground) is found in native coastal scrub, but Fiona shapes it like ordinary boxwood. Behind the table is a clipped Melaleuca lanceolata, which in the wild would grow into a large tree. Says Fiona: “We’ve pruned boxwood, roses, and lavender. Why weren’t we pruning Australian plants?” The main barrier is perception, she suggests. “People say to me, ‘Is that really a native garden? But—it’s so beautiful.’”
When a family came to Dirt Queen NYC seeking a backyard makeover, they really just wanted one thing: to be able to use their yard. The existing “garden” was a patchy stretch of grass with garages on three sides. Now that their kids were older, the family no longer felt they needed a lawn for playtime. Instead they craved an adult space for hosting dinner parties and a dedicated firepit area, which might even entice their teens to hang out at home.
Jarema Osofsky and Adam Bertulli, co-founders of Dirt Queen NYC, took stock of the existing conditions. The family wanted to keep the existing trees, including some arborvitae that were nicely screening the neighbor’s garage and some Norway maples that were creating dense shade on one half of the garden. Bertulli and Osofsky saw an opportunity to give their clients the function they craved, carving out two distinct garden rooms in the small space, while also creating a dynamic pollinator garden.
Here’s how they did it.
Photography by Brett Wood, courtesy of Dirt Queen NYC.
Before
Above: The yard was nothing but balding grass, arborvitae, and a stand of Norway maples. One impactful move Bertulli and Osofsky made was asking the neighbors if they could paint the back walls of their garages the same color. Luckily, they agreed.
After
Above: From uninspired and useless to inviting and functional. Above: Native flowering shrubs are the backbone of the new garden. For the garden’s midlayer, Osofsky used Clethra summersweet, oak leaf hydrangeas, and Viburnum dentatum, which she notes provides really beautiful berries for birds.
This trash-to-lushness story begins in the small town of Kyritz, Germany, when two creatives, Laura Muthesius and Nora Eisermann, decide to turn a historic apartment building into holiday rental units. The two performed their magic on the interiors (see their artful transformation of one of the flats over on Remodelista), but what to do with the backyard, which was unloved and unused, other than as a place to store trash bins?
The simple answer: add more plants and, in particular, more flowers. Aside from a hydrangea, the courtyard was devoid of color. After moving the garbage cans indoors to their own storage area and covering the hardscaping—uneven bricks and cobblestones laid out in a somewhat garish pattern—with a layer of gravel, Laura and Nora turned their attention to planting. More hydrangeas. A quince tree. Lots of oregano. American mint, anise hyssop, an aronia tree, climbing roses, lavender, sage, and potted olive trees.
“We wanted a wild-looking garden that has a Mediterranean feeling. We were a bit scared not to have enough light for the herbs like oregano and lavender, as it is not sunny all day in the backyard but it seems to be just enough as they are all growing so well,” they share. The plants were the costliest part of the landscape design but also “the best investment, as they just grow more and more beautiful each year.”
After moving in furniture to create outdoor living and dining spaces, and adding an outdoor kitchen (the chicest we’ve seen!), the once neglected courtyard is now their “secret little garden.” Let’s take a tour, and be sure to scroll to the end to see the space in its original state, complete with trash bins.
Above: Laura and Nora furnished the outdoor living area with pieces from Tine K Home’s bamboo collection. Above: “The ivy and wild vine that climb up the backside of the building is just so so charming and makes you feel like you are in a secret little garden.”
It’s always a delight to catch up with our friends at the California design studio Terremoto. Talk inevitably ranges beyond the confines of gardens, touching on issues within the landscape industry that are rarely addressed.
Appreciation of laborers and the creativity that they bring to a project is part of the Terremoto DNA. Co-founder David Godshall explains how this dynamic collective of garden thinkers and doers continue to meet the moment, while showing us around a lovely little garden in Ojai, northwest of Los Angeles.
Photography by Caitlin Atkinson except where noted.
On the Client Brief
Above: At the back of the house, old Chinese elm trees provide protection from the elements.
“The bones of the property were very beautiful but needed updating to be more functional for the clients, as their needs were softly different from the previous property owner’s. An avocado orchard existed, which we, of course, preserved and protected, and coast live oaks surround the property in a beautiful halo,” says David.
Above: For an area in full sun, “We created a mosaic of native and non-invasive Mediterranean plants.” These include sage and lavender.
“The magic of Ojai (I say this as a plant nerd) is that it sits at the confluence of multiple horticultural typologies,” David continues. “It’s a place where coastal sage chaparral crashes into agriculture (most notably avocados and citrus) and more cottage-y, slightly old-school garden-making traditions. Opuntia and geraniums have a surprisingly synergistic relationship. Our clients wanted to bring their garden into a thoughtful new era while being respectful of the innate qualities of Ojai that make it the place that it is.”
Post-renovation, the back yard was filled with debris, including shards of concrete. “Instead of dumping the stuff, we used what was there to create what I call an urban berm,” says Arrington. The berm was built on shards of concrete that were covered with a little landscape fabric, and topped with about two feet of soil, which was brought in for the entire yard. “When we pop elevations into a garden, the shadows change, the way we can see the plants inside changes. If you’re in the hot tub and you’re looking at a berm, it’s like the plants are surrounding you. That sense of privacy is something we wanted to create,” says Arrington.
3. Focus on local materials.
With the naturalistic aesthetic, hot tub, and gravel as their starting points, Arrington and Green leaned into local materials and native plants. Arrington notes that because the rock steps, pea gravel, and cedar are all locally sourced, they are more sustainable—and just feel right. “The colors are already a part of the landscape,” he says.
4. A small garden needs curves.
Sarah Jefferys Architecture Brooklyn Backyard
To create the wild, rambling feeling their clients desired, curves were essential, says Green. Using cedar shakes to edge the beds allowed them to perfect each swooping bed design. “The curves are informal, but still there is an art to creating and finessing them to feel natural, ” says Green, who describes how one of them would look down from the deck while the other placed the edging.
5. Rethink the privacy fence.
Not all fences are created equal. “The first day we stood back there, it was so hot and the air was really stagnant,” says Green of the existing fence. To get better air circulation in the garden, Arrington and Green proposed a louvered design. Crafted from rough cedar, it provides natural texture and will become grayer over time. Because privacy was still a concern, they designed the angle and span between louvers to be on the tighter side; relaxing the span would bring even more air in.
Caption: The bed at the base of the stairs is the sunniest spot in the garden, the amsonia turns golden yellow in fall. Photo courtesy of Verru Design.
6. Select a strong color theme.
A pale blush color theme holds the plant palette together in this garden. Designed to bloom throughout the year, Arrington and Green included Magnolia virginiana, which blooms a a silky white-almost blush color in spring; Geranium Biokovo, which is really light blush on the inside; and ‘Limelight’ hydrangea, which turns a twinge of blush at the end of the season.
My clients are often in love with gravel, or at least with the idea of gravel. But as a landscape designer, I have a love-hate relationship with the paving material.
The other day I visited a clients’ newly purchased house—and realized that the sellers had put pea gravel between the entry pavers to “dress it up.” Instead of neatly tucked between paving stones, the gravel was scattered everywhere, making for an uncomfortable walking experience. I thought: right material, wrong place.
Here are 10 things I wish all my clients knew about gravel:
After you decide to add gravel to your landscape, the next question to ask yourself is: what kind? Each type of stone has its own distinct look and textural appeal, and its own purpose. Your selection will vary regionally, so I recommend the first step should be to visit a local stone quarry to see what is available.
2. Get to know the three most common textures of gravel.
After you settle on a variety and color of stone, you will need to consider size and texture: decomposed granite, crushed stone, or pea gravel?
In a nutshell: Decomposed granite (or DG, as it’s known) is a powdery granite that makes a fine texture of silt and little rocks. DG is a popular option for paths and patios. Usually yellow-gold and fading to tan in color and relatively affordable. Crushed stone is probably the closest to the typical idea of what a gravel driveway looks like. This material is also used for patios, retaining wall drainage, back fill, and grading. Pea gravel is tricky because its name has the word “gravel” in it, but some note that pea gravel is actually a small and smooth river rock. See Hardscaping 101: River Rocks to learn more.
All week, we’re republishing some of our favorite Garden Visits that have a personal connection to our writers. No public gardens here, no vast estates, no professionally designed landscapes—just the backyards, vegetable patches, and flower beds that remind our writers of home. This story by Gardenista contributor Clare Coulson is from June 2022.
In the summer of 2017, I planted a gravel garden along a scrappy stretch of land that edged a recently renovated studio. I wanted to create a small garden that was a space for guests to look out to or sit in. I knew that this was a sunbaked area—it faces south and has no protection from either the summer sun or the wind that whips through the fields it faces out onto. And with extremely free-draining sandy soil, whatever was planted here had to be resilient and, as I had no plans to irrigate, drought-tolerant, too.
Photography by Clare Coulson.
Above: Stipa tenuissima is the star plant in the garden, acting as a tactile and shimmering base for the spires of verbascum and verbena to move through.
I signed up for the excellent gravel garden study day at Beth Chatto’s garden in Essex, which was a step-by-step with David Ward (he worked with Beth when she created her famed gravel garden in the 1980s). His key tips were: 1) choose plants carefully (Beth’s mantra, after all, was ‘right plant, right place’); and 2) start those plants off well. That means digging in some compost at the outset to ensure that you’ve got good soil and then soaking plants really well before you plant them, ideally leaving each plant soaking in a bucket of water for an hour before planting. Water everything well, but beyond this do not get out the hose.
Above: Dianthus carthusianorum is the perfect dry garden plant; from a low mound of fine leaves, it sends up leggy stems topped with hot pink flowers. They will occasionally re-flower if deadheaded.
We used a sub-base to stabilize the areas where we would walk around the beds and this was topped with gravel. I was left with two organic shaped large beds and once everything was planted I added some gravel around the plants, too, which helps minimize weeds but also retains some moisture.
To save money I grew almost every plant from seed. Some of those plants were incredibly easy to grow: Stipa tenuissima, Dianthus carthusianorum and Verbascum chaixii ‘Album’. Others, including Verbena bonariensis and Eryngium giganteum, I found much more tricky from seed, but they were brilliant self seeders; from a couple of verbena plants, there is now a self-seeded verbena forest in high summer of hundreds of plants that have just placed themselves in any available crack.
Above: Considering a garden from inside a house or building is crucial, creating vistas and sightlines from the place where you might sit and look out.
And the garden has really evolved to be a garden of self-seeders. Poppies have introduced themselves, flowering earlier than everything else in the summer and providing some color. These are followed by hundreds of white verbasums in June and July before the verbena peaks in late summer. I’ve also added some bulbs too—Narcissus ‘Thalia’ for spring and then Allium spaerocephalon for a later color pop around late June.
Light and movement are key to the garden’s success and I can’t say I thought that much about either when I was starting out as a gardener. The sun rises directly behind the garden providing some jaw-dropping moments in the morning. When the grasses here, which include Stipa gigantea and Calamagrostis x acutiflora ‘Karl Foester’ and especially the Stipa tenuissima, move gently on the breeze, it becomes a mesmerizing highly, tactile space. But this is also a garden for insects, and through the summer the garden hums all day and evening with a succession of bees, hoverflies, and butterflies.
Self seeders can, of course, be a pain to garden with. Each summer something edges more into focus and threatens to take over. There’s a constant battle with bronze fennel; its hazy clouds of foliage provide beautiful texture in spring and I love the towering umbels and incredible aromatic element they provide, but leave them to seed at your peril.
We are longtime admirers of Austin-based landscape architect Christine Ten Eyck—so much so that her works are featured in both of our books: 2016’s Gardenista: The Definitive Guide to Stylish Outdoor Spaces and our upcoming The Low-Impact Garden (in bookstores fall 2025). She has deep roots in Texas, and her landscape designs—artful, rambunctious, ecology-based, perfectly imperfect—celebrate the region’s rich plant diversity. Current projects include a campus transformation plan for University of Texas at Permian Basin and a new master plan for the Lady Bird Wildflower Center.
Below, Christine reveals her best gardening hack, favorite public garden (it’s not in Texas!), and more.
Your first garden memory:
Above: Christine, with her first ever catch, at her grandparents’ lake house. Photograph courtesy of Christine Ten Eyck.
My grandparent’s vegetable garden at their lake house. We would go fishing and my grandpa would put everything he cleaned out of the fish back into the garden soil. I was fascinated! He grew the biggest tomatoes.
Above: Christine swapped a lawn and driveway for tiered garden beds. “Our neighbors think we are nuts living in our own wild native habitat—but we love it,” she wrote in an Instagram post. Photograph by Marion Brenner.
Tough, wild, immersive.
Favorite go-to plant:
Eupatorium havanensis.
Plant that makes you want to run the other way:
Invasives like King Ranch Bluestem, Arrundo, Vinca major.
Plant that makes you swoon:
Above: A Rusty Blackhaw in bloom on Christine’s property. Photograph by Christine Ten Eyck.
Rusty Blackhaw Viburnum.
Hardest gardening lesson you’ve learned:
The garden will not always look perfect.
Unpopular gardening opinion:
People need to appreciate resilient gardens that wither, turn brown and gold in response to drought.
A mirror of water and the simpler the better—think about the brimming bowls of the Alhambra in Grenada, Spain.
Favorite way to bring the outdoors in.
Big windows with gray green painted mullions.
Favorite hardscaping material:
Above: “The entry to our house where a driveway used to go right over the tree roots at the base. We created a sedge frame around this spectacular live oak,” says Christine. Photograph by Marion Brenner.
Above: Christine is an avid traveler. Here she is in Monterey, Mexico.
It brings me joy, exercise, and a sense of accomplishment. It is meditative and restorative for me to prune, rake, and just be immersed in the garden along with all the birds and butterflies.
Earlier this week, Remodelista readers were treated to a tour of a row house in Ghent that was was formerly “charmless” and now fresh and chic thanks to its resourceful new owners, Arthur Verraes and Kelly Desmedt, who did much of the remodeling work themselves. Today, we’re visiting the elements that make the outdoor space equally cool.
While Arthur, architect and founder of Atelier Avondzon, led the house renovation, his girlfriend Kelly, a corporate lawyer, is the mastermind behind the overhaul of the back garden. She had no prior experience with gardening. “I grew up without having a garden myself and knew nothing about plants,” says Kelly, who discovered her green thumb during the COVID pandemic, when they purchased the house. “Ever since, I’ve been thinking about studying to become a landscape architect or to do something with it in a more professional way. For now, I’m indulging this passion by helping out friends and family from time to time and by designing our next project.”
The landscape design was actually the first thing the couple tackled, before turning their attention to the house renovation. “I would definitely recommend this sequence. The moment we were able to move, it already felt like home and the garden was already in full bloom,” she says. “Not to mention, this allowed us to plant trees that we wouldn’t be able to plant afterwards (urban townhouse).”
Below, she gives us a tour of the newly reimagined outdoor space. (Be sure to scroll to the bottom for the before images.)
Above: Arthur and their dog posing at the front door of their remodeled row house. Two simple changes to the exterior transformed the entire look: 1) painting the garage door, gutter, and window frames green and 2) adding a wisteria to frame the front door.
Above: The couple tackled the backyard before renovating the house. Next to them on the lower left is a Mediterranean spurge shrub (Euphorbia characias). Above: “We wanted to create an intimate, green, and cozy environment. a perfect place to catch some morning sun, to have a coffee next to the master bedroom or a place to cool down on a hot summer day. That’s why we decided to plant multiple trees in it, despite the small space,” says Kelly. The tree on the left is an Amur cork tree (Phellodendron amurense).
Above: Arthur and Kelly added these concrete steps that lead to a green roof above. The stairs serve as plant shelves as well for their collection of potted succulents. Above: Kelly chose gravel for the hardscaping for environmental reasons. “We really wanted to ensure a permeable surface. [Flooding] is a big problem in Belgium.”
“You have to be a tough to be allowed in.” Lindsey Taylor is explaining how she decides which plants to grow in her cinderblock garden, which is located in an old mechanic’s lot that she’s transformed into a thriving urban garden in Newburgh, NY. “I don’t have a lot of time to care for it, so it’s a bit of a survival of the bullies,” she continues. “Drought-tolerant is important—no heavy drinkers. And I have a thing for tall plants and umbels. If you’re an umbel, you get a free pass!”
Ornamental grasses and deep-rooted prairie plants like rattlesnake master make appearances, as do seasonal blooms: bulbs in early spring, poppies and valerian and lots of self-sowers like Ammi majus, Orlaya, Nigella, Scabiosa, Clary sage, Verbascums, and Asters for the fall. They’re all contained (barely) in raised cinderblock beds, a nod to the squat cinderblock garage on the property. On the other side of the garden is a a three-story brick factory that’s now home to Atlas Studios, a compound for creative professionals co-owned by Lindsey’s husband. (See Industrial Revival: Atlas Repurposes a 1920s Abandoned Factory into a Creative Hub.)
“Aesthetically it made sense to use the cinderblocks to create raised beds, and the cost was right. We already had a lot of cinderblocks in the yard,” she notes. ” And the raised beds are very functional as they help to keep dogs out of the planted areas.”
The beds keep the rowdy plantings in check, too. “I like a bit of madcap-ness in my garden. Plants are allowed to mingle but the clean edges of the cinderblocks and the groomed gravel paths (I try to keep them tidy) help hold it all together, like a wonderful huge crazy wild arrangement.”
Above: The cinderblock garden abuts the parking lot for Atlas Studios. Lindsey purposely chose higher-than-normal raised beds and tall plants so that the garden can be admired from inside the building.
Above: Lindsey working in the garden. In these beds are Valerian, Russian sage, Mexican feather grass, Guara, Verbascum, and plum poppies. “I weed selectively—after a rain is easiest. I let certain plants like Orlaya, bronze fennel, and Nigella stay, but I consider how much I leave. You don’t want to leave it all or you’d just have a mess.”
Chances are high that over the last two decades, you’ve been influenced at least once by Deborah Needleman, even if you’ve never heard of her. At different times over a long stretch starting in the early aughts, she helmed three of the most influential trendsetting publications in the country: domino (which she founded), followed by WSJ (the Wall Street Journal’s monthly magazine), and later T: The New York Times Style Magazine. Before she was a style arbiter, though, she was a garden editor (House & Garden) and columnist (Slate). And now, she’s returned to her first love—the world of plants. “It’s been ages since I was a garden writer and constantly immersed in the world of gardening. But now my days again revolve around being immersed in nature and making things from it—gardens and baskets, including basketry things for the garden like plant tuteurs, cloches, and trugs,” says Deborah, who spends most of her time now at her country home in the Hudson Valley. “I’m just so happy to back mucking around in the garden and in the woods.”
Below, she makes the case for non-natives in the garden (when they make sense), Okatsune secateurs (“better than Felcos”), and an all-white gardening outfit (we’re now converts).
Photography courtesy of Deborah Needleman, unless otherwise noted.
Above: Deborah, in her sitting room, surrounded by flowers, both real and man-made: painting of tulips by Luke Edward Hall, watercolor of nasturtium by Emma Tennant, porcelain hyacinth by Vladimir Kanevsky. Photograph by Lily Weisberg.
Your first garden memory:
Not a garden, but the wild woods at the edge of the newly built suburb where I grew up. It felt like entering the private, backstage area you weren’t supposed to see, because everything around it was neat and manicured and without drama or mystery. And years later, when I first heard the term “landscape architecture,” it opened my mind to the idea of designing spaces from the materials of nature. A total revelation. I wanted to make places that incorporated wildness and unpredictability within the bounds of a structure.
Garden-related book you return to time and again:
I most often go back to Henry Mitchell’s The Essential Earthman, essays from his old column in TheWashington Post. He was a colleague of mine in the ’90s–erudite, hilarious, eccentric, and wildly opinionated. He was offended by the idea of “low maintenance” gardens, and adored ephemeral plants and flowers, as those are the ones that have the power to break your heart. He would take the day off work when his bearded irises bloomed.
Describe in three words your garden aesthetic.
Nature coaxed into atmosphere.
Above: Deborah’s mostly cultivated, slightly wild garden in Garrison, NY.
I’m crazy for spires like verbascum and foxglove. And I also love an umbellifer–Queen Anne’s lace, ammi, angelica.
Above: A gorgeous jumble of Verbascum ‘Southern Charm’, nepeta, and allium in her gravel garden.
Plant that makes you want to run the other way:
I don’t go in much for leaves that are red or yellow or variegated as they often look sickly or like they’re trying too hard to make a point. And I’ve often thought that if forsythia didn’t flower so early, probably no one would countenance that beastly yellow later in the season when there are so many other things to delight us. This season I realized I’d had enough of its shaggy demeanor and clashing jolt of brightness against the soft, subtle colors of early spring. They’re getting evicted as soon as I have a moment.
Favorite go-to plant:
Boxwood balls. They seem to solve almost every garden problem.
Above: Boxwood balls make an appearance in Deborah’s vegetable patch.
We learned this young: When the third little pig chose brick, he knew what he was doing. As a building material, brick has stood the test of time. It’s hardworking, aesthetically versatile, easily maintained, eco-friendly, and affordable. Although it’s sometimes considered a formal look for a patio, that depends on the type of bricks, the color, the pattern, and the application.
Here’s everything you need to know to design a brick patio:
Most bricks are composed of clay soil combined with lime and sand. Although red bricks are the most common, bricks come in many colors, including cream, grey, tan, buff, pink, brown, and black.
The color varies according to several factors: the relative proportion of lime, the color of the sand, and the temperature and duration of the firing. One strong attribute is that brick color doesn’t fade with age or wear.
If you’re looking for a weathered look and don’t want to wait years to get it, you can buy tumbled bricks. Used bricks are another option–try searching under “building materials” on Craigslist. But don’t buy unless you’re assured that any residual mortar has been cleaned off. Whatever you choose, make sure they’re bricks that will work well for a patio–they’re not too porous, for example, or prone to flaking in freezing temperatures. If in doubt, check with a stonemason or stoneyard worker.
Your choice of pattern will be largely determined by how much space you have and how much money you want to invest. Here are the most common patterns, from the least expensive and labor-intensive to the most:
Running bond just means bricks laid in simple rows. Concentric squares or rectangles are variations on running bond; these are appealing if you have enough space to show them off. In smaller spaces, a concentric pattern can look busy.
Basketweave is a classic pattern that’s slightly more labor-intensive than running bond. It comes in many variations. To make the pattern work, you’ll need bricks that are twice as long as they are wide (plus any mortar joint). That also reduces the number of bricks that will need to be cut.
Herringbone is a timeless look that works well for both pathways and patios. A herringbone set at 45 degrees is somewhat more expensive because the bricks on the edges all need to be cut. Herringbone set at 90 degrees involves less cutting.
Every time we come across an edible landscape designed by Oakland-based Leslie Bennett, we are struck by the magic and beauty she brings to something as practical as a kitchen garden. She recently wrote an entire book on how she does it (Garden Wonderland hit bookstores this month). And today, she’s pulling back the curtain a little more on what inspires her work.
How did a former attorney specializing in cultural property, landscape preservation, and land use law come to actually work with the land? “Learning how to grow food was life-changing for me,” says the Bay Area native, who apprenticed at organic and biodynamic farms for three years before starting Pine House Edible Gardens. “I’ve been figuring out how to design beautiful, productive landscapes ever since, partly by trial and error, and partly through collaboration with the really talented and skilled group of designers, landscape architects, and farmers who have been a part of my team for the last decade-plus.”
Below, she reveals her “half pruning” method for longer blooms in the garden, her secret weapon for warding off slugs, and her favorite hardscaping material (that also happens to be cheap and child-friendly).
Photography by Rachel Weill for Garden Wonderland, unless otherwise noted.
Above: “I love my work and my journey toward doing it, as it’s not at all what I expected I would do, but I’m so happy to have landed here,” says Leslie. Photograph by Daniel Shipp for Georgina Reid’s The Planthunter: Truth, Beauty, Chaos and Plants.
Your first garden memory:
I remember often being in our family’s suburban backyard when I was growing up. My brother and I were enthralled with the snails that lived on the big citrus trees and we decided to start a snail farm. We set up a big box, filled it with leaves and fruit from the orange trees, and plucked all the snails off the plants and put them in the box, where we kept them alive and fed for at least a few days! We thought it was the coolest thing ever and made my parents take photos of us with our new pets. Now a snail farm sounds so gross to me and makes me laugh. But of course, my two young kids now love observing the snails that live in our backyard and they have their own little bug boxes set up—I’m happy knowing that our family garden is nurturing their sense of curiosity and wonder about life and nature.
Describe in three words your garden aesthetic.
Above: Leslie’s Oakland backyard.
My garden aesthetic is personal, eclectic, and maximalist. I love layers!!
Garden-related book you return to time and again:
My new garden design book, Garden Wonderland, of course! Truly, I am in the phase right now where I look through it all the time and remember fondly the entire process of making it.
Instagram account that inspires you:
@justinablakeney really inspires me. I relate to her so much as a fellow mixed race Black woman, mother, and designer. I love her interior design aesthetic, which, like mine, tends toward personal expression, plants, layers, and maximalism. I also love seeing how she’s developed her authentic voice on social media, has grown her identity as an artist, and has been able to orient toward overall wellness. These are all areas I’m working on, too, and that I appreciate her modeling so authentically.
Plant that makes you swoon:
Above: Ligularia gigantea.
This changes every year or so, but right now I’ll go with Ligularia gigantea. The broad, glossy green foliage texture makes everything around it look incredible, so my team and I use it in designs whenever we can.
Favorite go-to plant:
Culinary bay. Another one with glossy broad green foliage that is so easy to grow in a pot or in the landscape, is great for cooking, and has so many healing properties, too.
Unpopular gardening opinion:
Above: Pine House Edible Gardens is known for designing vegetable gardens that feature both beauty and bounty.
What happens when a Japanese-style garden meets the southern California desert? For the very Zen results, let’s visit a serene gravel courtyard that landscape architecture firm Terremoto designed for Mohawk General Store in Santa Monica.
Above: Passionflower vines soften the redbrick facade of Mohawk General Store. “The vines were existing when we started the project and we decided to keep them because they were happy there,” says landscape architect David Godshall.
“This was an attempt to create a garden that was both Japanese and desert simultaneously,” landscape architect David Godshall says, adding that client Kevin Carney wanted a space to have movie screenings and to create a backdrop for fashion shoots.
The garden, formerly occupied by gardening shop Potted, had existing hardscape (some concrete slabs) and a few specimen plants—including two large palms—that the team salvaged from the previous design. “For the rest of it, we started from scratch.”
Above: During the remodel, Terremoto removed “chunky, two-inch gravel and a fair amount of existing concrete” and replaced the surface with decomposed concrete with “a heavy dusting” of gravel on top to stabilize the DG, Godshall says: “With this approach you lose the negative aspects of getting DG on the bottom of your shoes and also the feeling that gravel is a trudge to walk through.”
“We made the design process conversational,” Godshall says. “We went cactus shopping with the clients. Then we went boulder shopping. After we got all the elements on site, an incredibly hardworking crew shadow boxed them into place. Then there was a lot of looking at how things looked, walking around, and shifting it around.”
Have you ever swam in a natural swimming pool? There’s no chlorine, no chemical taste or smell, nothing to sting your eyes. Recently architect Alan Barlis, who designed one for a client in New York’s Hudson Valley, described the experience like this: “Incredibly blissful. Once you swim in one of these things you feel like you’ve been so refreshed. It’s like being in a Brita for an hour. It’s like taking the best shower of your life.”
It sounds as if we all should be swimming in natural pools, for our health and the environment’s. So why aren’t we? For one thing, natural swimming pools cost more to install (on average 10 percent more than conventional pools, says an industry spokesman). Perception is another problem, because some swimmers equate chlorine with cleanliness. Finally, a lack of uniform guidelines and rules in the US may make the idea of installing a natural swimming pool seem, well, murky.
On the other hand: incredibly blissful.
So read on for everything you need to know to decide whether a natural swimming pool is for you.
What is a natural swimming pool?
Above: In Switzerland near Lake Lucerne, a natural swimming pool supported by a retaining wall on a steep slope “appears to almost float weightlessly out over the valley,” the designers say. Photograph courtesy of Biotop.
Think of a natural swimming pool as a chlorine-free zone. Instead of relying on chemicals to keep the water clean, natural pools have water gardens with plants that naturally filter and clean the water.
Industry pioneer Biotop, headquartered in Europe, has installed more than 5,000 natural swimming pools worldwide during the past three decades. Other industry players include Ellicar (formerly Ensata) in the UK, and Bio Nova and Total Habitat in the US.
How does a natural pool work?
Above: A natural pool at Plane Trees Lodge in Australia has a water depth of 6 1/2 feet. Photograph courtesy of Biotop.
