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.
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.
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.
This is part of a series withPerfect 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.
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.
Welcome to Meanwhile, on Remodelista, in which we take a look at the goings-on over on our sibling site. We’ve been noticing recently, both there and on our own site, a new love for the unpolished and uncultivated in landscape design. We know it’s not a look for everyone (hello, HOA!), but when the rewilded […]
Let us count the many reasons we love Butter Wakefield, the Maryland-born, London-based garden designer who has won numerous prestigious awards for her exuberant projects (twice at the Chelsea Flower Show!). 1) She has no fear of color (her home is as bright and joyful as her gardens). 2) No outdoor space is too tiny for her—in fact, small city backyards are her forte. 3) She designs gardens as one would design interiors, that is, with attention to texture, palette, balance, and comfort. 4) Then, of course, there’s that ridiculously charming name (a childhood moniker that has blessedly stuck). Is there any question we’d be fans?
Read on to learn the pros who inspire her (it’s a who’s who of British designers), the dreamy garden object on her wish list, and best of all, images of her own compact West London backyard. And if you find yourself wanting still more Butter in your life, be sure to sign up for her just-launched online course on “Small Garden Design” with the Create Academy.
My maternal grandfather had the most spectacular gardens in the gorgeous countryside outside of Philadelphia. They were gloriously flower-filled and curiously very English in style and design. I loved wandering around and through them as a girl, and loved the colour-rich tapestry he created.
Above: Don’t have space to plant a tree? Consider a potted tree.
Hardest gardening lesson you’ve learned:
Working for friends is often so much more difficult than one ever imagines.
Favorite gardening hack:
Plunging small pots in large buckets of water through out the summer, it’s the quickest best way to water them.
Favorite way to bring the outdoors in.
Above: Potted roses.
Growing a range of reliable cut flowers in pots is something I always try to include in every scheme. It’s a hugely joyful undertaking to step outside, cut flowers and bring fresh blooms indoors. It is certianly my favourite way to start the weekend.
We’ve been writing about Tama Matsuoka Wong for more than a decade—first in 2013 when we joined her for a foraging (and eating) adventure on her 28-acre property in Hunterdon County, NJ, then again in 2017 when she co-authored the cookbook Scraps, Wilt + Weeds with Danish chef Mads Refslund (of Noma fame). And more recently, earlier this year, we were swept up by her new book, Into the Weeds, which lays out her “wild and visionary way of gardening.”
All of which is to say, we are unabashed fans—of her forage-focused recipes, of her let-nature-take-the-wheel gardening philosophy, of her passion for plants that are often misunderstood and loathed. “Some are ecologically invasive plants, some are just ordinary garden weeds, and some are native plants that aren’t on the list of showy ornamentals but are part of a vibrant natural plant community,” she says.
Below, the self-described “garden contrarian” shares why she thinks planting doesn’t have to be a part of gardening, which tool she uses to maintain her meadow, and why she always has crates in her garden.
Above: The “ecologically minded forager, meadow doctor, and lecturer” has written three books. Her first, Foraged Flavor, was nominated for a James Beard award; her second, Scraps, Wilt + Weeds, received the IACP “Food Matters” award. Read about her latest, Into the Weeds, here. Photograph by Colin Clark.
Your first garden memory:
In New Jersey, mucking about in the garden dirt with my mother, and picking wild berries. My mother grew up in Hawaii, climbing coconut trees and she always told me she loved the feel of the earth in her hands.
Garden-related book you return to time and again:
It’s an oldie but goodie: Bill Cullina’s Native Trees, Shrubs & Vines: A Guide to Using, Growing, and Propagating American Woody Plants. I still have my dog-eared version of Weeds of the Northeast by Richard Uva. I’ve also read multiple times H is for Hawk by British author Helen Macdonald and My Wild Garden: Notes from a Writer’s Eden by Israeli writer Meir Shalev. They inspire me. And, of course, Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer.
Above: Outdoor dining on her property, surrounded by “weeds.” Photograph by Ngoc Minh Ngo.
Wild, wonder-filled, wabi-sabi.
Plant that makes you swoon:
A survivor plant in its natural habitat and community: whether desert, chaparrel, bog, pine barrens, highlands, low country.
Plant that makes you want to run the other way:
Callery pear tree (bradford pear tree).
Favorite go-to plant:
Above: Tama likes to forage staghorn sumac fruit to cook with. See her recipe for Sparkling Sumac Lemonade Recipe. Photograph by Tama Matsuoka Wong.
Rhus typhina (staghorn sumac).
Hardest gardening lesson you’ve learned:
Nothing is forever. Plants thrive when and where the conditions are uniquely suited. We can’t over-think, over-design, and over-control these conditions, especially now with changing and unexpected weather conditions. Just be grateful when a plant has an amazing year.
Unpopular gardening opinion:
My mission is not popular: Weeds, by definition are not popular.
Gardening or design trend that needs to go:
The idea that everything in a garden needs to be planted, that we need to “install” a landscape.
Favorite gardening hack:
Above: “These crates are covering newly planted turkey tangle frogfruit, an unnoticed, weedy native plant that likes to grow ‘in wet ditches.’ ” Photograph by Tama Matsuoka Wong.
Recently we spotted a project on The Modern House that compelled us to stop our scroll and investigate deeper: a home that looks otherworldly and not of this time, located in Dartmoor, a region of southwest England known for its rugged landscape dotted with outcroppings and pre-historic sites. Capped with a rolling green roof and set into a hillside, the two-story residence disappears into its environment, sometimes literally.
“We wanted something that was timeless, that would still be here in a couple of hundred years. I read so many articles about houses with conservatories, swimming pools, tennis courts, games rooms and cinemas. You just don’t need all that,” its owner Gail Pirkis, a literary editor, told The Modern House. Instead, she and her husband, David, hired Peter Hall from Van der Steen and Hall Architects to design a unique but unostentatious house that “faded away around” the landscape.
The project took seven years to complete, during which time they found themselves subtracting the superfluous from their plans (“we didn’t want fancy bathrooms; we didn’t want gizmos in the kitchen”). What they ended up with is a truly low-impact home with a soft, modest footprint that’s simpatico with the natural world that surrounds it.
Here’s a peek. For the full story (and interior images), go here.
Above: The couple prioritized the use of local materials. “The granite that faces the building comes from the spoil heap of the quarry that was used to build nearby Castle Drogo, the last castle to be built in Britain designed by Edwin Lutyens.”
Above: Two levels of green roofs help keep the house cool in the summer months.
Any article about Physostegia begins with the acknowledgement that this plant’s most-common common name, obedient plant, is a misnomer: Physostegia is anything but complying. The name obedient plant refers not to its behavior in the garden, but to the nature of the plant’s stems. “You can move the flowers from side to side, and they stay put—a welcome trait making this a fun cut flower,” explains Christina Koether, a garden and floral designer based in Weston, Connecticut.
While obedient plant’s blossoms are snapdragon-like (it’s also known as false dragonhead), it is a member of the mint family, and like mint, it spreads quickly by stolons—hence its reputation for disobedience, something Chris Liloia, the habitat gardens curator and the North Carolina Botanical Garden (NCBG) has experience with. While the plant now grows in NCBG’s Piedmont habitat, Liloia says, “It’s actually a remnant of the perennial border that I can’t get rid of. It has just cropped up in different spaces.”
But Koether says, “Its disobedience, or toughness, is what I love most.” Marissa Angell, a landscape architect based in Brewster, NY agrees, noting, “When I use Physostegia, it’s because I want a more aggressive plant to fill a space quickly, which is ideal for restoration or seeded meadow settings.”
Here’s everything you need to know about this tough and beautiful native:
Photography courtesy of North Carolina Botanical Garden, unless otherwise noted.
Where should you plant obedient plant?
Above: P. angustifolia is seen here in Norris’s prairie garden. He grew the plant from seed, which is available through Prairie Moon and Missouri Wildflowers Nursery. Photograph courtesy of Kelly D. Norris.
All the experts we spoke to say obedient plant does best in a damp, sunny spot in a naturalistic design with other native species.“Like any plant, they require context for maximal appreciation,” says Des Moines-based ecological garden designer Kelly D. Norris, who is the author of New Naturalism. “These plants evolved to compete in grass-dominated environments. You can commonly find P. virginiana in wet ditches growing cheek-to-jowl with cattails, sedges, and tall grasses. Is it any wonder when gardeners remove them from that context that they sprint in every direction?” Place obedient plant in spots with poor drainage, in bioswales, or any place where spongy, absorbent vegetation has value.One place never to use it? In more “curated” gardens where you want plants to stay in one spot, says Angell.
Is obedient plant invasive?
“Tough natives like this are sometimes accidentally called invasive, a term reserved for non-native plants that are monitored by individual states and are bad for biodiversity and pollinators,” says Koether. Physostegia virginiana is, in fact, helpful to pollinators. “Long blooming from summer to frost, the blooms are loved by hummingbirds, bees, and butterflies,” Koether adds. Obedient plant’s thuggishness can also crowd out invasive weeds.
What are the different varieties of obedient plant?
Above: Physostegia virginiana at the North Carolina Botanical Garden.
There are purple, pink, and white-flowered varieties of Physostegia. Physostegia virginiana is the species most commonly available at nurseries, but Liloia notes that there are actually two subspecies of virginiana, a northern and southern one. There are also a few cultivars, including ‘Miss Manners,’ which is advertised as a less aggressive, compact, and white-flowered version of the plant. Koether hasn’t had much luck growing it and Angell notes “it’s not as delicate or nice but you get some of the same feeling as the native, straight species.” Norris has both Physostegia virginiana and P. angustifolia, which is native to the central United States, in his garden and says, “P. angustifolia has been comparatively less aggressive than P. virginiana in my experience, and its paler flowers add an ethereal quality to the garden.” Koether adds, “The renewed interest in this plant is exciting. I’m hoping to try more cultivars soon.
What plants are good to grow next to obedient plant?
Above: Physostegia virginiana grows next to ‘Solidago rugosa ‘Fireworks’ in the Piedmont habitat of North Carolina Botanical Garden.
Where would you expect to find a meadow filled with native flowers and grasses, where once an expanse of lawn grew? In a suburban front yard, as the short-back-and-sides neighbors give the gardener’s tousled vision the stink eye? At the summer home of weekend warriors who have newfound respect for the perils of mugwort? Or in an urban cemetery that doubles as a laboratory for biodiversity? Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York, is home to an experimental wildflower meadow, seeded in October of 2022, and part of the cemetery’s Urban Grasslands initiative.
This summer, from June through July, I visited the meadow over the course of six weeks, watched its palette evolve, learned about the reasons for the transition from lawn to wildflowers, and some of the challenges unique to this unusual site.
Above: Coreopsis and Penstemon in the experimental meadow in early June.
Set on a ridge in South Brooklyn, with views of New York Harbor, Green-Wood is no ordinary cemetery. The green space is a haven not only for the dead but for the living: for birds and the birders who watch them, for a monk parakeet colony, for honey bees in hives, for native pollinators, for artists in residence, for researchers, and for the local community, who find respite from urban life among the towering trees of this nationally accredited arboretum and historic landmark.
Above: In early June the meadow’s palette is yellow with white relief from Penstemon and Achillea.
Stippled with weathered marble and brownstone headstones, the 1.2-acre wildflower meadow is one of four re-wilded areas in close to 30 acres of public lots on the cemetery’s historic perimeters. “These lots were some of the first areas to be developed as an affordable internment option when Green-Wood was established in 1838,” said Sara Evans, the Director Of Living Collections and Curator at Green-Wood. In contrast to the large opulent family lots, she explained, “the public lots are dense with small graves characteristically marked with modest headstones primarily made of more delicate stone.”
Collectively, they are now the site of the ongoing project to transition from high-maintenance turf that requires noisy and carbon-unfriendly mowing (which also risks damaging these modest headstones), “to resilient native species more tolerant of drought, an increasing feature as the planet warms and the climate changes.”
Each of the six sections in the experimental meadow is seeded with a different combination of native grass and wildflower species “that also differ in species-richness (low-to-medium-to-high diversity),” said Sara. The goal is to “test and see what communities evolve, especially in terms of mowing stresses.” Paths are mown to allow access for visitors and researchers, and each wildflower block is given at least one annual mow with a weedwacker or hedge trimmer, “cut very high, at eight to ten inches, to leave material for nesting pollinator habitat and seed heads to establish a seedbank,” she said.
Above: Coreopsis leaning over a mown path in the meadow.
To prepare the site prior to sowing, the existing lawn grasses were treated with herbicide. Sara explained that such a large area, “with hundreds headstones,” cannot be solarized. (This technique involves placing expanses of plastic sheeting over unwanted vegetation to heat the soil underneath, spurring the germination of seeds, and their subsequent death. With established plants it can take a very long time.) Despite the treatment, some resilient invasive and naturalized plants persist: Mugwort, as well as bermuda, foxtail, sweet vernal, and brome grasses remain a perennial challenge.r
The name The Wild Yards Project tells you a little about its founder David Newsom’s journey over the last seven years: It started out as a project. A Los Angeles-based film professional and photographer, Newsom had recently become a parent when he discovered gardening. “I immediately began to worry about my kids’ baseline interaction with the wild world,” he says. “I had no background in botany. I wasn’t into horticulture. I just knew that I found solace in being around plants and animals, and I wanted to give my kids that.” Newsom decided to rewild his backyard, so his kids could have nature right outside their door.
Above: Newsom’s own yard reveals how land can come back to life. “Before I began this work, the state of our home’s dead, baked lot [at left] was overwhelming and depressing,” he says.
As Newsom transformed his yard, he documented his work. “I made so many mistakes, but I wrote about it,” he remembers. “And because I had worked in documentary television, if I saw someone who had written an article or someone who was doing really great work, I would just call them.” As Newsom learned more and shared his journey on social media, he says, “I quickly realized that a lot of people were hungry for the idea.” In 2018, he decided to make his project official, naming it The Wild Yards Project—note that it was yards plural–not just his own.
Above: Newsom’s own wild yard looking particularly lush after California’s atmospheric rivers this past spring.
“At first, I thought I would just go around and film and share stories about what people did,” says Newsom. “But I pretty quickly felt compelled to get my own hands dirty and to build these gardens.” Soon Newsom was consulting with other homeowners who wanted to rewild their yards. “I would go over to their house and help them spin a story about what their land could be—that’s how it started.” His work led to deep research into hyperlocal plants in his Mediterranean chaparral biome and ecological gardening practices. “There’s a series of benefits, so many stacked functions to these gardens beyond amplifying biodiversity,” he says. “We’re amplifying physical and mental health, water infiltration, and carbon sequestration.”
Above: This hillside garden is an example of a full design and install project that Newsom executed for a client.
Casual advice gradually morphed into more formal garden coaching and eventually design and installation services. However, Newsom’s landscape work is different from traditional garden designers. For one, he wants his clients to get their hands dirty. “I tell them: I promise you’ll know more about your land in a year than I do,” he says. “When people move away from traditional gardens, they become authors in the natural and cultural history of their land—and that land is its own educator.” For any project, Newsom visits the property, tests the soil, and explores nearby nature with a similar disposition. Then he creates a plant list and offers a design plan whose execution can range from homeowner DIY to full design and install. Gardeners who want to do it themselves can book Newsom hourly for future coaching. “You don’t need to spend $50,000 to $150,000 on high-priced landscapers,” he says.
There are two main reasons that you might consider planting a pollinator garden in pots instead of in the ground: Either you don’t have a garden bed—or you’ve run out of space to plant anything more in your garden. In either scenario, a container garden can support pollinators just as well as an in-ground garden. Even if you aren’t dealing with space constraints, you might consider adding some pollinator pots, says Alicia Whitaker, a master gardener and a co-leader for the Suffolk Alliance for Pollinators’s South Fork chapter. “If they’re near an outdoor seating area, the gardener can see and enjoy the wildlife that will be attracted.” Plus, she notes: Containers are also a great option if the gardener has a mobility issue or other handicap that makes gardening in the ground difficult.
Above: A bumble bee nectaring on goldenrod. Photograph by Kim Eierman.
Here, nine tips on how to garden for pollinators in pots:
1. Be prepared to water often.
The most common mistake with any container garden is underwatering. “The soil in pots dries out faster, especially in a very sunny and hot environment, such as a windy deck or brick patio surface,” says Whitaker, who notes that people often underestimate the water needs of container plants because they are accustomed to worrying about overwatering indoor houseplants.
2. Go big.
Above: Susan Nock, a Boston-based garden designer with a specialty in container gardens, filled a large pot with tall grass, agastache, foxglove, daisies, scabiosa, verbena, angelonia, and sweet potato vine for a dynamic, pollinator-friendly design. Photograph by Susan Nock.
Garden pros recommend choosing the largest container possible. “A higher volume of soil will dry out less quickly,” explains Whitaker. But there’s another reason to go big: The more plants you cram into a pot, the better the chances the pollinators will find them. “When we use large pots or gang pots together in groups, we create some floral targets for pollinators,” says ecological horticulturist Kim Eierman, the author of The Pollinator Victory Garden and founder of EcoBeneficia. “That’s really important. Having a larger target makes it much easier for the pollinator to find the resource.” If you’re worried about weight, you can use a false bottom planter.
3. Amend the soil.
Both Whitaker and Eierman suggest mixing compost into the container’s soil, to nourish the plants and encourage root growth. “I apply a limited amount of compost a couple times a year to beef up the soil biology because there’s no interchange with any other soil,” adds Eierman. “I just put it on top and let rain do its thing.” Whitaker adds, “We often hear that native perennials prefer leaner soil and don’t require fertilizer, but the artificial environment of a container calls for better soil and the regular use of organic fertilizer.”
4. Consistency + variety is key.
Just like humans, pollinators need a diverse diet, but that doesn’t mean you need to run out and buy dozens of different plants. Eierman says to aim for a balance between diversity and sufficiency of given plants. So, rather than having many tiny plants of a wide variety of species, focus on a few types. “It’s better to have a more substantial amount of that one species,” says Eierman. Whitaker adds, “Think drifts, not polka dots.” When pollinators forage they’re looking for that one plant species, so a repetition of bloom from container to container can attract them without having one massive target, Eierman notes.
5. Give the bugs color cues.
Above: This composition of ‘Giga Blue’ pincushion flower, ‘VIBE Ignition’ purple salvia, and S’unSparkler Firecracker’ sedum by Monrovia demonstrates how you can do a monochromatic pollinator design using one color but different plants. Photograph via Monrovia.
“We know that pollinators have their color preferences,” says Whitaker. Hummingbirds are attracted to red flowers, while many bees love purples and yellows. Butterflies are drawn to a wide range of colors, but moths are attracted to white blossoms. “it’s good to have a variety of colors, and a variety of shapes,” says Whitaker, noting, “There are almost no wrong choices.”
When multiple people we admire tell us we should check out The Food Forward Garden, a new gardening book coming out this fall, we pay attention. “It’s a design manual on the art, craft, and importance of growing food closer to home,” says its author, landscape architect Christian Douglas, who has made a name in the industry designing beautiful gardens that provide both nourishment and beneficial habitats. Now based in the Bay Area, he began his career in England, creating landscapes for historic estates and London townhomes, after which he spent several years “exploring desert ecologies and regenerative agriculture throughout the world.” Today, his work is an appealing reflection of this background: His landscapes are a little structured, a little wild—and always teeming with life.
Christian’s book hits bookstores this October. In the meantime, read his thoughts below on the “Russian doll” method of planting, the plant he’s “fallen deeply for,” and his current garden fetish.
Photography by Sasha Gulish, courtesy of Christian Douglas, unless otherwise noted.
Above: Christian, pictured here in the garden of celebrity chef Tyler Florence, a client and friend.
Your first garden memory:
Gardening with my father on our wild and weedy 1970s Oxfordshire allotment. Eating muddy carrots and earthing up potatoes. Wheelbarrow rides and grass paths. Watering cans and runner beans.
The seed that started it all..
Garden-related book you return to time and again:
Second Nature by Michael Pollan. A wonderful love letter to gardens.
Instagram account that inspires you:
Todd Carr and Carter Harrington’s @hortandpott. These two creatives are fascinating to watch as they develop their business and homestead in Upstate New York. Maximalist, botanical heaven.
Describe in three words your garden aesthetic.
Above: Christian’s mid-century hilltop home in San Rafael. “We love to host and entertain. Our neighbor’s children love charging around the native meadow and foraging in the kitchen garden,” he says.
Curated, timeless, immersive.
Plant that makes you swoon:
A tangle of Carex pansa and California poppies. I’ve fallen quite deeply for Eschscholzia californica ‘Alba’ (poppies) these past few years. Something about the buttery lemon blooms feel soft and delicious on the eyes, especially when a bumble bee is romping around on the anthers.
Plant that makes you want to run the other way:
Blocks of ‘Platinum Beauty’ Lomandra. I can’t quite get to grips with the “why” of variegated grasses.
Favorite go-to plant:
Above: “Edible decoration for my outdoor lounge area.” Pictured is ‘Bountiful Blue’ blueberry in a basket planter—”these Prolific smaller varieties have been bred specifically home gardens”—and ‘Rogers Red’ grape creeping in underneath. Photograph by Christian Douglas.
Vitis ‘Rogers Red’ (grape) and I are having a moment lately. It doubles wonderfully as a shade vine and rambunctious groundcover, with delicious table grapes and crimson leaves in the autumn. Lower water use. Great for florals, too.
Hardest gardening lesson you’ve learned:
Close your gate. While both are lovely to have in the garden, deer and vegetables don’t play well together. I’ve learned (and subsequently, unlearned) that lesson far too many times to remember.
Unpopular gardening opinion:
Above: For a client in in Marin, Christian replaced a lawn with a stylized French potager with willow planters and gravel/brick pathways. Espalier apple, pears and fig frame the perimeter.
Above: Anastasia and Taylor (right) at their office.
Talc Studio‘s design aesthetic is the landscape equivalent of the perfectly mussed bedhead. Their outdoor spaces for clients up and down California are naturalistic and bordering on wildness, but at the same time highly considered and chic. “We are artists and designers that make gardens. We are gardeners that live and breathe art and design,” is how its founders, Taylor Palmer and Anastasia Sonkin, describe themselves. “Grounded in the arts and aesthetics, our medium allows us to explore the dense wonder of the natural world.”
Next up for the duo: “We are opening a studio space and a retail shop + showroom in West Marin (Northern California), right on the glorious Highway 1. Stay tuned and come visit us this fall.” We can’t wait! In the meantime, we’ll just soak up Taylor and Anastasia’s plant wisdom, shared below, on everything from the tree they always snap up to their surprising distaste for drip irrigation.
Photography by Jorden DeGaetano, courtesy of Talc Studio, unless noted.
Garden-related book you return to time and again:
Above: Landscape as Protagonist emerged from a symposium at Melbourne Design Week 2019.
We try to stay off of Instagram, but when we are on it… @lucianogiubbileigardens: His gardens never get old and never go out of style. Endless inspiration.
@maryamnassirzadeh: Maryam’s style and point of view is authentic, free spirited and sophisticated. We want our gardens feel like her collections. She does everything so well.
Describe in three words your garden aesthetic.
Above: The pair at a wild iris meadow in Point Reyes.
Intimate, elegant meadow.
Favorite go-to plant:
It’s a tie. Pennisetum spathiolatum (we call her “spath” for short). Loves the heat, can tolerate a little shade, always reliable.
Banksia integrifolia. Our Banksia grower has us on speed dial for when a good-looking crop is ready because they know our love for them is strong. We believe they are the ultimate, under-used coastal California tree.
Plant that makes you swoon:
Above: Eriogonum nudum. Photograph by Taylor Palmer.
Taylor: Eriogonum nudum (naked buckwheat). I admire its independence, its resilience, and immense beauty. It has this remarkably long, drawn-out process of growing up and dying back for more than half of the year.
Plant that makes you want to run the other way:
Anastasia: Red/burgundy Phormiums…No, no, no!
Hardest gardening lesson you’ve learned:
Taylor: Sometimes it’s hard to say goodbye. Coming to terms with mortality. The ebb and flow of life and death.
Unpopular gardening opinion:
If this question refers to unpopular opinions that we hold, we are trying to eliminate drip irrigation.. all those plastic tubes!
Gardening or design trend that needs to go:
Above: Dense, naturalistic planting at a Talc project in Sebastopol. Photograph by Taylor Palmer.
Anastasia: Black mulch, plastic edging, planting in a straight line.
I can’t get enough of the blue flax in my yard, but it wasn’t always this way. With most other perennials, it’s a binary case of love or hate. With blue flax, though, it was more complicated.
Above: Blue flax’s five-petaled flowers range from a pale blue to a bright cerulean. Photograph by Debbie Ballentine via Flickr.
I’m newish to Central Oregon, where I relocated after a lifetime of living on the East Coast, and unfamiliar with the plants native to this high desert region. Hydrangeas, a landscape leitmotif on the East, are rarely seen in these parts, but Linum lewisii, another plant with vividly blue flowers, peppers the landscape. I see blue flax thriving in the wild on the trails; swaying in the wind next to the the chain-link fence that surrounds the local high school track; and growing in my own front yard, where it was planted by the previous owners.
Above: Once established, one blue flax plant can generate many, many petite flowers. Photograph by Philip Bouchard via Flickr.
While I was immediately smitten with the delicate blue flowers (measuring just 1 to 1.5 inches across) that float over thin stems, I was less than happy to learn that they wither by day’s end. I have always had a bias for durable, long-lasting blooms, and these ephemeral flowers, with an expiration date that measures in hours (not even days), offended my practical sensibility. The thing is, the spent flowers are replaced the next morning with a flush of new blooms. All summer long, this 24-hour cycle of birth, death, and rebirth is repeated.
Above: This flower will die by the end of the day, but new buds are standing in the wings, ready to bloom the next morning. Photograph by tdlucas5000 via Flickr.
I’ve come to admire blue flax. Every morning, like a child waking up to look for fresh snow, I eagerly grab a cup of coffee and peer out our front window searching for the new blooms. Throughout the day, I check on them. And early evening, I do one last inspection to see if, by some miracle, they’re still around, gently swaying in the breeze. They never are. But come morning, I fill up my cup again—and delight in their rebirth.
Cheat Sheet
Above: Its stems can look messy and leggy, so best to plant them en masse or crowd them next to tall grasses and wildflowers. Photograph by George Wesley and Bonita Dannells via Flickr.
Discovered by Meriwether Lewis (of Lewis and Clark fame) in the Rocky Mountains, Linum lewisii is commonly known as blue flax, wild blue flax, prairie flax, Lewis flax, and Lewis’s flax.
The drought-tolerant, deer-resistant perennial is native to Western North America, growing wild in prairies and mountain trails.
Grows to 18 to 30 inches tall, with needle-like blue-green leaves.
Will readily self seed once established.
Exhibits a clumping habit; looks best en masse or mingling in a dense planting with tall grasses.
The cultivar commercially grown for its fibers, seeds, and oil is common flax (Linum usitatissimum), but blue flax’s seeds are edible, too, as long as you cook it first.
Its bloom period covers a long span, from April to September (though in Central Oregon, where the last frost date was in late spring, mine didn’t start blooming until early June).
Keep It Alive
Above: Blue flax happily mingling with coast sunflower, California fuchsia, Sulphur buckwheat, California sun cup, and ‘Margarita BOP’ penstemon. Photograph by Debbie Ballentine via Flickr.
Hardy from USDA zones 5 – 8.
Extremely easy to grow, the wildflower is both cold-hardy and heat-tolerant.
Fairly shade-tolerant but happiest in full sun.
Drought-tolerant, it has low to medium water needs.
Best planted in well-draining soil; preference for rocky or sandy conditions, dislike of clay soil or wet conditions.
To prevent self seeding, prune almost down to the ground at the end of the growing season; if not a concern, leave them standing for birds to snack on during the winter and cut back in early spring.
This is part of a series with Perfect Earth Project, a nonprofit dedicated to toxic-free, nature-based gardening, on how you can be more sustainable in your landscapes at home.
“A garden needs a heartbeat,” says Leslie Needham, founder of her eponymous design firm in Bedford, NY. And Needham will be the first to admit that her former English-style garden—tightly clipped hedges, filled with plants originating from around the world—didn’t quite have one. “It was pretty stagnant,” she says. But when she looked down at the Mianus River Gorge, a protected stretch of land filled with native plants that abuts her property, she saw a flourish of birds, animals, insects. It thrummed with activity—it had a heartbeat.
Working with Andrea Spunberg, a senior designer at her firm, who was also one of Needham’s first landscape design students when she taught at the New York Botanical Garden, she began incorporating native plants into existing beds, converting areas of lawn into meadow and letting plants grow more freely and openly. Soon phloxes and asters courted butterflies and bees. Shrubs like bayberry and Fothergilla provided shelter for wildlife. And grasses and sedges, like little bluestem and carex, offered four season beauty.
Her new design philosophy focuses on “blurring the edges horticulturally to provide a connection, as Doug Tallamy encourages, to the natural landscape around us,” she says. “There’s a comfort that comes when a planting is correct for its environment,” says Needham. “It just feels of a place.” Spunberg agrees, “It feels alive.”
Below, Needham and Spunberg share eight ways to make your garden spring into life.
Photography of Leslie Needham Design.
1. Embrace the vernacular.
Above: Leslie and Andrea stand in front of Needham’s greenhouse. The two do extensive research of the native flora for each project, reading extensively, walking in local parks to see what’s growing and where, and studying the conditions of the property before coming up with a plant palette.
“Architecturally, I understood how a house needs to fit into its setting. It was built in a certain style for a certain reason to a certain scale,” says Needham. “But then I realized, there’s a vernacular in the landscape too and you get it through native plants. I now think of genius loci: what is the spirit of this place and how do you get it?” For Spunberg, who grew up in Hungary, conserving natural resources by gardening with native plants was part of her upbringing. When she moved to the states, she brought this sustainable approach with her, gravitating to native plants in her designs out of resourcefulness but also because she is totally smitten with them. “Wildflowers are so much joy,” she says. “I love the understated beauty, the life they bring, and the connection to the wilder landscape.”
There are maybe a handful of living landscape designers whose names non-gardening types may recognize. Dan Pearson is one of them. Known for his beautiful, bordering-on-wild gardens and commitment to fostering biodiversity, the British designer, horticulturist, and writer (his quarterly online magazine, Dig Delve, is a must-read) started gardening at 6, opened his practice in 1987, and has since gone on to design jaw-dropping gardens all around the world, many of which we’ve covered here on this site (go here, here, and here for a sampling). Now in his fourth decade as a landscape whisperer, he continues to create immersive experiences that garden-philes plan trips around: “I’ve just started work on a public park in Japan, the second phase of Delos at Sissinghurst will begin this year, and I am working with Rachel Whiteread at a sculpture park in south of England,” he tells us.
Clearly, the garden guru is very much in demand, but anyone can have access to his ideas via his online Create Academy courses (he launched “A Naturalistic Design Masterclass” in 2021 and a follow up, “An Expert Guide to Planting Design”, last year.) And, of course, you’ll learn a lot from his Quick Takes answers below—including his favorite plant, tool, and outdoor wear.
Photography courtesy of Create Academy, unless otherwise noted.
Above: When he’s not in London or on a work site, Dan can be found at Hillside, his 20-acre property (a former cattle farm) near Bath.
Your first garden memory:
Making miniature moss gardens out of pincushion mosses.
Cassian Schmidt. Cassian’s observations of plants growing in the wild and the way that he interprets those plant communities in naturalistic plantings are beyond compare.
Describe in three words your garden aesthetic.
Above: A gravel path flanked by effusive plantings at Hillside.
Wild, immersive, and contextual.
Plant that makes you swoon:
Above: One of Dan’s dogs admiring his Yoshino cherry tree (Prunus x yedoensis). Photograph via @coyotewillow.
Prunus x yedoensis—the quintessential Japanese cherry for blossom. I love the anticipation of bud break every March, the way that every inch of the branches is covered in the single, soft pink flowers and how the tree buzzes with bees on a warm spring morning.
Plant that makes you want to run the other way:
Euonymus fortunei ‘Emerald ‘n’ Gold’. Of all variegated shrubs this is the most difficult to live with. The brashness of its yellow makes it the loudest and worst-dressed guest in any garden, demanding attention.
Favorite go-to plant:
Above: Butomus umbellatus. Photograph via @coyotewillow.
Umbellifers. From cow parsley to giant fennel umbellifers have the most pleasing form and are all pollinator magnets. I couldn’t garden without them.
Hardest gardening lesson you’ve learned:
To be able to let go of a garden when the time comes to move on. Creating a garden requires total application and commitment and a large part of the process is making an investment in the future. When I have had to give up gardens I have made—both for clients and for myself—there is always a sense of loss, of grief almost, which takes some time to process.
Unpopular gardening opinion:
Above: The critters at Hillside love a bit of overgrown messiness.
When my friend and colleague Margot Guralnick and I set out to write The Low-Impact Home, we had many discussions with Remodelista founder Julie Carlson about whether our project would be a beautiful coffee table book or a nuts-and-bolts manual for eco-minded homeowners. What we realized was, we needn’t sacrifice one for the other. Our book would be equal parts inspiration and information.
When I opened up Beyond the Meadows: Portrait of a Natural and Biodiverse Garden by Krautkopf, in bookstores now, I immediately recognized in it the same desire to both inspire and edify. That the book is brimming with gorgeous images isn’t all that surprising given its authors, German homesteaders Susann Probst and Yannic Schon, are professional photographers. What is unexpected, and delightful, is how much they’ve chosen to share about their experience as new homesteaders. The two really get into the weeds, if you will, of how they designed their landscape, cared for their plants, welcomed biodiversity, naturally enriched the soil, and, ultimately, became self-sufficient. Diagrams, before and after shots, and plant lists help tell their gardening journey. And they’re blessedly not shy about revealing their mistakes, either.
Above: Susann and Yannic’s homesteading journey started in 2018, when they moved from Berlin to a small cottage with lots of land in a village in northeastern Germany. It was built as a “settler’s house,” one of many that cropped up post-WWII to encourage people to become more self-sufficient. Their new book, now available in English, documents their experience working the land as new gardeners.
“To be honest, we held back from writing a gardening book for a long time,” Susann tells us. “We felt we were only at the very beginning of the learning process and therefore didn’t feel ready. However, at one point we realized that this gardening journey would never end and that we would constantly be learning new things that would be worth writing about. So there would never be the ‘right’ time to start.” The results are less guidebook and more garden memoir. “We wanted a book full of beauty and inspiration, which would nevertheless contain our knowledge and experiences from the past five years,” she says.
Susann and Yannic’s garden appeared in The Low-Impact Home—Margot and I were enchanted by their property and their commitment to ecology-based gardening—so I read their book with great interest. But even if you don’t know a thing about them and don’t harbor any fantasies about growing your own food, Beyond the Meadows is a must-read. It’s for anyone curious about how to be a better gardener or adopt more planet-friendly approaches—and also for those who simply yearn to slow down and smell the earth.
This is part of a series with Perfect Earth Project, a nonprofit dedicated to toxic-free, nature-based gardening, on how you can be more sustainable in your landscapes at home.
“Mother nature is the ultimate landscape designer. We’re just her helpers,” says Emilia deMauro, who, along with her sister Anna, runs the East Hampton, NY, landscape design firm deMauro + deMauro. Their approach to design is imbued with a sense of community and responsibility to preserve the beauty of the native environment.
The sisters grew up shuttling between the rolling hills of rural Northeastern Pennsylvania, where their artist dad lived, and the farm fields and overgrown thickets of the east end of Long Island, where their mother was farming and gardening. “Both of those landscapes play a huge part in our designs,” says Anna, who studied at the Florence Academy of Art in Italy. “There’s something so beautiful in the wildness. We’re constantly pulling from those memories.”
They found kindred spirits in architect Nick Martin and his wife Christina. The couple believed strongly in “pivoting away from green lawns that require chemicals and continual labor, and, most important, that strip our community of habitat for creatures big and small,” says Christina. They hired the sisters to design the landscape outside of Martin Architects, Nick’s new Bridgehampton office on the Montauk highway. A busy thoroughfare, situated just past a gas station and across from a bank, didn’t deter them from achieving their joint vision: a self-sufficient oasis, lush with native plants and alive with birds, butterflies, and wildlife, that looks beautiful year-round.
Photography by Doug Young, courtesy of deMauro + deMauro, unless otherwise noted.
Above: For the meadow in front of Martin Architects, the deMauros devised an interspecies matrix planting. They densely planted small perennials (grasses like prairie dropseed and wavy hair grass, and flowers including slender blue iris, gray goldenrod, and white heath asters) approximately 12 to 18 inches apart to help with weed suppression and water conservation.
The property was neglected when the Martins bought it. “To transform the space, we removed the asphalt driveway, regraded the land because the pitch was so bad, with the goal that it wouldn’t need irrigation,” says Nick. He also tried to reuse as many materials as possible.
When officers arrived, they found a 20-year-old man who had been shot in the leg. He was taken to the hospital to receive treatment.
The identity of the victim has not been released.
According to the investigation, the victim was leaving his apartment building when another man walked up to him and asked if he had any marijuana for sale.
TRENDING STORIES:
The report said the victim told the man that he did not sell marijuana and turned to leave.
At that time, authorities said the suspect pulled out a firearm and demanded that the victim give him money.
The victim said that a struggle began, and he was shot.
ATLANTA (AP) — Mark Meadows, former White House chief of staff, is trying to avoid having to testify before a Georgia special grand jury that’s investigating whether then-President Donald Trump and his allies illegally tried to influence the state’s 2020 election.
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis opened the investigation early last year, and the special grand jury was seated in May to review evidence and hear from witnesses. Willis filed a petition in August seeking to have Meadows testify before the panel.
Because Meadows lives outside of Georgia, Willis can’t simply issue a subpoena for his testimony. Instead she has to get a judge in South Carolina, where he lives, to order him to appear.
Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney in Atlanta, who’s overseeing the special grand jury, signed off on the petition Willis filed for Meadows, certifying that he is a “necessary and material” witness for the investigation.
After receiving the paperwork from Willis’ office, a prosecutor in Pickens County, South Carolina, on Sept. 9 asked a judge to set a hearing to determine whether Meadows must go to Atlanta to testify. In a response filed Monday, a lawyer for Meadows asked the South Carolina judge to deny the request.
Lawyer James Bannister argued in the court filing that Meadows has exerted executive privilege, which is currently being litigated in federal court so he is not a “material witness.” Meadows invoked that privilege in a fight against subpoenas issued by the U.S. House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Bannister also wrote that the summons before the court is now moot because it sought Meadows’ appearance on Sept. 27, which has now passed.
Will Wooten, a prosecutor in Willis’ office, said in a sworn statement made Oct. 7 and filed with the South Carolina court Monday that it’s his understanding that a hearing hadn’t been scheduled on the request to compel Meadows’ testimony because of scheduling conflicts. He provided several dates in November and asked the court to order Meadows to appear on one of those dates.
Bannister also asserted that the South Carolina law governing out-of-state subpoena requests applies only to criminal proceedings and, therefore, doesn’t apply because the special grand jury is a civil inquiry.
The special grand jury cannot issue an indictment. Instead, it can recommend action in a report when its investigation is complete. It would then be up to Willis to decide whether to seek an indictment from a regular grand jury.
Despite the special grand jury’s inability to indict, McBurney wrote in response to an attempt by Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp to avoid or delay his testimony that this is, indeed, a criminal investigation.
In the petition seeking Meadows’ testimony, Willis wrote that Meadows attended a Dec. 21, 2020, meeting at the White House with Trump and others “to discuss allegations of voter fraud and certification of electoral college votes from Georgia and other states.” The next day, Willis wrote, Meadows made a “surprise visit” to Cobb County, just outside Atlanta, where an audit of signatures on absentee ballot envelopes was being conducted. He asked to observe the audit but wasn’t allowed to because it wasn’t open to the public, the petition says.
Meadows also sent emails to Justice Department officials alleging voter fraud in Georgia and elsewhere and requesting investigations, Willis wrote. And he participated in a Jan. 2, 2021, phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, during which Trump suggested the state’s top elections official could “find” enough votes to overturn his narrow election loss in the state.
