All week, we’re revisiting the most popular stories of 2025, including this one from May.
A transportive garden can owe as much to a magical setting as to the plantings. At the garden of brothers and award-winning garden designers Harry and David Rich, the surrounding landscape ramps up those feelings before a visitor even sets foot in the garden. Nestled deep in Welsh woodland, this is a fairytale cottage fully immersed in nature—including roving herds of sheep—where access is possible only by bridge over a stream, a tributary of the River Wye.
The atmospheric garden is one of 18 featured in my new book Wonderlands: British Garden Designers at Home, in which I explore the private spaces of leading landscape designers, revealing how their own homes become testbeds for their professional projects; these are spaces for the slow evolution of ideas, schemes, and plant combinations, as well as private idylls where they can retreat from the world. Some are grand projects created over decades, but many, like Harry and David’s cottage garden, are hands-on gardens created with limited resources in the past few years.
Photography by Éva Németh.
Above: A run of pleached crabapple trees dissects the space and creates a link from the building to the garden.
Harry relocated from London to the secluded cottage just north of the Brecon Beacons in Wales, where he now lives with his wife, Sue, and their two children. But the garden has always been a shared project between the two brothers, who together became the youngest winners of a gold medal at the Chelsea Flower Show in 2012, when Harry had just formed his landscape architecture firm and David was still at university. They went on to create two more gardens at the show, winning another gold medal in 2014.
Above: Plantings are taken right up to the cottage walls, increasing the sense of full immersion in greenery.
When I put a call out to my garden design friends about the topic of “cramscaping,” I received a lot of replies along the lines of, “I have never heard of cramscaping, but I suspect I do it” or “I had no idea this was a thing, but it’s what I practice on a regular basis.” The concept had recently been covered in The Seattle Times, and I was curious to discover its origins.
I ultimately found a reference to “cramscaping” in Loree Boh’s book Fearless Gardening: Be Bold, Break the Rules, and Grow What You Love, which was published in 2021. When I called Bohl, who also writes the popular blog Danger Garden, Bohl said she didn’t coin the term, but she recalls the first time she heard a garden style described as “cramscaping.” Bohl was walking the Northwest Flower & Garden Show with a friend, who used the term to describe the display they were looking at. “It instantly just made sense to me,” says Bohl. “It says it all: Lots of plants.” When Bohl asked her friend about the term, she pointed to their mutual friend, plantsman and garden designer Sean Hogan of Cistus Nursery.
Next, I reached out to Hogan to see if he knew the term’s provenance. Hogan told me he wasn’t sure if he originated the phrase, but it has been in his personal lexicon since the 1990s. Hogan remembers first using it to describe a container that was planted so densely and with such variety that he likened it to a bouquet. From there, he started using the word to describe landscapes in general. “If you can have a quick phrase or a fun just word to give people a different picture, it allows people to think outside the boxwood, as it were,” he says.
So what is cramscaping exactly?
Above: After years of cramscaping, Bohl now sits in her Portland garden completely surrounded by plants. “It’s a wonderful feeling,” she says. “There are so many more plants I want to grow, I must make space for them and keep experimenting.” Photograph by Loree Bohl.
Both Bohl and Hogan define a cramscape as richly layered with a variety of plants and no bare earth visible. The term may be instantly understandable, but Bohl is quick to point out that cramscaping is not simply squeezing as many plants as possible into a landscape. “Cramscaping is done with a little more care and knowledge of eventual plant sizes and plant needs,” she explains, noting that without this foresight, an extra densely planted garden can be “a disaster waiting to happen.”
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.
The new book A Year in Bloom has a great premise: Ask some of the world’s top garden people to talk about their favorite bulbs, thus solving one of gardeners’ biggest dilemmas—which of the many, many bulbs out there to plant. And the beautifully packaged results come as a relief, as the trend is mainly toward less artifice and less effort when it comes to bulbs.
Written and compiled by Lucy Bellamy (former editor of Gardens Illustrated) and photographed by Jason Ingram (the best in the business), the book’s contributors offer insights that make for a fun read. Not all of their comments made it into the book—and we have some of them here. Let’s take a look.
Above: Narcissus ‘Bath’s Flame’ and N. ‘White Lady’.
Daffodils that look like they might have been shown at the RHS exhibition halls in Westminster 100 years ago are the ones with the right look, and yellow is not to be shied away from. Of Narcissus ‘Bath’s Flame’ (above left), Lucy writes, “Over recent years there has been a trend for more delicate forms of narcissus that sit easily in semi-wild plantings, and ‘Bath’s Flame’ is at once just wild and just cultivated enough.”
Narcissus ‘White Lady’ was chosen by admired Irish plantsman Jimi Blake, who told Lucy: “This variety was originally grown as a cut flower back in 1898. It’s pure elegance on a stem, with its pristine white petals and soft yellow cup with a delicious scent. I grow this in a border with other simple narcissus such as ‘Polar Ice’, ‘Thalia’ and ‘Segovia’. The other nominee for N. ‘White Lady’ was your own Gardenista correspondent—me. They were in the old-fashioned cottage garden of my elderly next door neighbor, and they began to drift into mine, with some help.
Above: Crocus sieberi ‘Firefly’ with ruffed yellow Eranthis hyemilis (winter aconite), planted in the perfect setttng, amid leaf litter from the previous autumn.
Lucy points out that bulbs that are good for naturalizing also look quite “natural.” Crocus are small, and they shine in the low-key surroundings of dried leaves, and under the bare limbs of shrubs and trees. There is no need to bundle up the leaves of daffodils after flowering, or tie them into neat knots; the simpler forms tend to have more demure foliage, which disappears into lengthening grass as the season progresses. It’s best to leave them alone anyway, so that seeds can disperse, and bulbs can spread underground. When they appear year on year, they are “emulating the patterns they make in nature.”
Above: Narcissus bulbocodium and N. pseudonarcissus.
The hooped petticoat-shape of Narcissuc bulbocodium is the same yellow hue as other spring flowers, including daffodils, but its character is altogether different. Described by California landscape designer Ron Lutsko as “steadfast and cheerful,” it benefits from being away from the throng. “It is best grown in pots as a single-species group, to give the opportunity of closely observing the flowers.”
Delightfully named Narcissus pseudonarcissus is the diminutive wild daffodil of the Wye Valley and Welsh Borders, and it’s also the “go-to choice” for Sissinghurst’s head gardener, Troy Scott Smith. James Basson, garden designer and a Chelsea Flower Show star who is based in the French Alpes-Maritimes, says: “These daffodils revel in the stone cracks of karst landscapes [featuring eroded limestone], and they push through the snow to shout out in bright yellow.” This was the second most nominated bulb.
Above: Crocus tommasinianus and Erythronium ‘Joanna’.
“I think time is the fourth dimension,” says Louise Agee Wrinkle, in the kind of Southern accent you’d hope to find in Alabama but so rarely do. She continues in a way that is dramatically unhurried: “Time, and change, and the garden, all tied together. Every time you deal with plants, you’re dealing with change.” In a remarkable half hour film presented by The Garden Conservancy (A Garden in Conversation: Louise Agee Wrinkle’s Southern Woodland Sanctuary), we are pulled into Louise Wrinkle’s world, the one she grew up in, and the same garden that she called “the jungle” as a child. On returning to the garden and the town of Mountain Brook 40 years ago, she was not tempted to give it a more formal and conventional look. Her approach, summed up in the title of the new edition of her book, Listen to the Land, is more responsive: “I’d rather stand back and look at the landscape, and let the landscape speak to me.” Let’s go for an amble.
Above: What it looks like when nature guides the design.
The region around Birmingham, Alabama, is mountainous and essentially wooded, with an enviable abundance of native flora. Mrs Wrinkle’s decision to gently guide the woodland rather than aggressively cultivate was logical, especially when described in her own no-nonsense voice: “The design is what nature gave me to work with,” she says, noting that there would be little point in pursuing an English, French or Japanese-style garden. “They are an imposed pattern on the landscape.”
Above: Louise Agee Wrinkle. “Every garden is an autobiography, whether they’re prim and proper, or wild and woollier.”
In forging her own path as a gardener, Louise Wrinkle has had a great influence in her region, and was a founding member of The Garden Conservancy, while taking an active involvement in the Garden Club of America. Now in her tenth decade (having published her book in her ninth), gardens all around Mountain Brook have held on to a strong sense of place, even with development going on all around, because of visits and advice from the informal garden doctor. Recalls one member of the Little Garden Club, Louise would point to a garden’s essence, with the mantra “Play up, and clear out.”
Above: A garden of pathways and streams, that asks visitors to look around, and then look around again.
Louise Wrinkle assembled some of the region’s most interesting garden figures to help her in reinvigorating the garden. John Wilson of Golightly Landscape Architecture points to the rock work along the creek bed: “They look like they’ve always been there but every rock was meticulously thought out.” Landscape architect Norman Kent Johnson, a member of Louise’s original team, describes the garden as collaborative; it is not the result of garden plans, but was designed on site.
Above: “It’s a designed landscape, not a preserved landscape,” says James Brayton Hall, CEO of the Garden Conservancy.
A Garden in Conversation is the longest film that The Garden Conservancy has made so far (beautifully photographed by Michael Udris), and it is the first one to interview a garden’s creator. James Brayton Hall, CEO of the Garden Conservancy told me: “It’s a wonderful thing to hear a living person talk about how they design their garden, and why they garden. The Garden Conservancy is not about the ‘how’ of gardening; it’s about the ‘why’ of gardening. Gardening is a cultural activity and as Americans we’ve lost sight of that a little bit.”
Has there ever been a less rock ‘n’ roll category of plant than shrubs, subshrubs, and bushes? A new book, Shrouded in Light: Naturalistic Planting Inspired by Wild Shrublands, makes the case that woody plant communities have some important answers for gardeners trying to figure out how to design naturalistic landscapes in a changing world. Authors Kevin Philip Williams (gardener) and Michael Guidi (ecologist), argue that in the rush to embrace prairies and perennials, shrubs have fallen from grace—and our idea of a bush bears no relation to anything in the wild.
Above: At the Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge in Maine, fallow fields are converted into early successional shrubland habitat, through planting shrubs and initial mowing. They are crucial to the survival of dozens of animal species. Photograph by Michael Guidi.
In his excellent essay in the book’s foreword, Nigel Dunnett suggests that shrubland is closer to a natural landscape than prairie grasslands, which remain in an early successional state with grazing and fire. Neglected by us and not much grazed, the year-round, three-dimensional structure of shrubs is appreciated by the creatures that shelter in them, and the smaller plants that they shade and protect.
Above: “Atomic age junipers, neglected and thriving outside an abandoned mid-century modern structure in Denver, Colorado.” Photograph by Kevin Williams.
The cultural journey of clipped shrubs, from Sissinghurst Castle and Versailles to suburban gardens and parking lots the world over, gives them a kitsch appeal that the authors have fun with. “As society advances into post-capitalism and our hastily produced infrastructure crumbles and is abandoned, the outlines of shrubs with which we have surrounded our homes will flourish and spread, creating shrubdivisions and shruburbs,” they write.
Above: More persuasive captioning: “On wide open dunes, shrubs act as refugia, creating microclimates and windbreaks, stabilizing surfaces and depositing organic matter.” Photograph by Kevin Williams.
Dunes and dune marsh-elder (Iva imricata), make a genuinely stunning combination. Shrubs are caretakers of ecosystems, and the dune marsh-elder is a dune protector, growing close to the tideline on much of the North American Atlantic coastline.
Above: Exciting, under-subjugated patterns in the mountains of Oregon. Photograph by Sean Hogan.
Thriving in places that do not respond to a plough, and generally “under-subjugated” by people, shrublands make their own arrangements of form, color and texture, in the kind of visual patterns that we would do well to try to follow. This one, including Cascade blueberry, western azalea and hoary manzanita, occurs in Josephine County, Oregon.
Above: A dry montane shrubland in Colorado, where a desert bioregion transitions into cooler, higher mountain conditions. Photograph by Michael Guidi.
