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.
Known for his low-key but elegant designs that have a distinctively New York vibe, Brook actually grew up in Lexington, KY, in a family of green thumbs. “My father worked for Parks and Recreation and was known around town as the tree guy. My brother and I started a lawn care company that incorporated into a landscape management company. By the time we were teenagers, all the best local landscape architects were hiring us to do their installations,” he says. After moving to the Big Apple and working with a few popular rooftop designers, he struck out on his own and founded Brook Landscape, a design-build firm dedicated to creating spaces that get people outdoors. “I would like everyone to spend less time looking at pictures of gardens on their phones and more time connecting with nature and local communities,” says Brook.
Hear, hear. But before you heed his words and log off, read his thoughts below on the importance of “boring” plants in his designs, the tree that makes him happy, and the color pairing he can’t stand in the garden.
I spent most of my days as a kid in the backyard. It wasn’t big but my father spent all his time gardening. We had grape hyacinth planted by the front porch. For me, they were mesmerizing. They looked just like food or candy (but you shouldn’t eat them). We had a cherry tree in the front yard that my mom would have us climb every season to pick and then pit them with her on the porch. We had a basic, round brick patio in the backyard that held our grill. Grillouts were the best. The yard wasn’t more than 800 square feet, but my siblings and I played hide and seek every day and always found ways to disappear. It was magical.
Garden-related book you return to time and again:
Wendel Berry’s The Unsettling of America. It tells the story of a society that has lost its connection to the land. It details the value of land stewardship and staying in rhythm with Mother Nature. It reminds us that value is often misplaced and peace is a feeling earned from hard work.
Instagram account that inspires you:
If we do our job right, our clients aren’t on IG. They are outside communing with nature, hanging out with friends, or relaxing and sipping tea. My current truth is, stay off the info smack. I’m not interested in AI-generated gardens. I’m not interested in photography or branding. Yes, some photo inspiration is good but get creative, go hiking, see what Mother Nature is doing, and try and recreate that.
Not to say it’s not a tool but if you need alcohol to dance, you should stop drinking.
Describe in three words your garden aesthetic.
Above: A recent Mediterranean-inspired landscape design for Athena Calderone (of Eyeswoon) in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn.
Relaxed, refined, and balanced. I’m an artist available for commissions. We try and help our clients get what makes them happy. We will apply the art and our gardens have our mark on them. Similar to the previous question, I’m afraid the housing market and renovation generation have placed too much relevance on objects and space. I like nice things but hate working so hard to maintain an all-white outfit. Mother nature is adaptable. Garden style should be too.
Plant that makes you swoon:
The Tamarisk tree always makes me do a double-take. It’s magical. Like a scotch broom but a tree. So soft-looking, and it just makes you happy.
Plant that makes you want to run the other way:
Potato vine. Lime next to burgundy? Now I’m just being snobby. In reality, it’s not about hating things, it’s about loving them.
Favorite go-to plant:
Above: English Ivy—boring but reliable and does a great job of softening hardscaping.
Here’s how Ariella Chezar has been described in recent press: “a leader in the farm-to-flower movement” (in Vogue); “the godmother of seasonal floral design” (by Erin Benzakein of Floret Flower Farm). And here’s how Ariella describes herself: “Florist, teacher, author, lover of growing things,” she wrote, when we asked for her bio. Obviously humble and undeniably excellent at her craft, the veteran floral artist, who splits her time between the Berkshires in Massachusetts and Hillsdale, NY, shares her thoughts today on the no-till book she references constantly, her struggles with bindweed, and the sun hat she has on repeat.
No Polkdot Gardens. I don’t like a garden that has too many different colors and plants, which results in something that doesn’t allow the eye to rest.
Plant that makes you want to run the other way:
Dyed flowers.
Favorite go-to plant:
Clematis.
Plant that makes you swoon:
Philadelphus. It is so beautiful and divinely fragrant. In its season, I always have a sprig of it next to my bed.
Hardest gardening lesson you’ve learned:
Tilling, a.k.a. propagating bindweed throughout my field. I made the beginner mistake of tilling up a field that was full of bindweed, thereby propagating it. [Tilling can break up its roots into smaller pieces, which then leads to new plants.] It is one of the most difficult weeds to keep under control.
Favorite way to bring the outdoors in.
Above: A loose, fluid arrangement of peonies that Ariella designed for a fundraiser in May for Berkshire Waldorf School (both she and her children attended the school).
Fill your house with plants, cut anything you love and place it around your house.
Not being realistic about gardening in wetland conditions and thinking plants will survive if I plant them high enough. But even some of the hardiest can’t stand up to salt-water floods. I have had to let go of my love for boxwood hedges, which were wiped out in Hurricane Sandy. I try to focus on native shrubs and hardy plants. My vegetable beds are very high now as well.
Unpopular gardening opinion:
Above: The Rosa multiflora on her property provides food and shelter for the birds.
I have embraced the invasive species that the birds help spread. Planting on a barrier island with climate change evident in the rising waters and frequent, bigger storms presents many challenges, to say the least. The season starts with yellow flag irises surrounding the house to the multiflora rose explosion in May and finally capped off with a profusion of purple loosestrife in July to August.
Gardening or design trend that needs to go:
A gardening practice that has to cease is the use of toxic pesticides that are killing us with cancer-causing chemicals seeping into our water and killing the pollinators, birds—destroying the food chain. It’s unbelievable that the US has not banned Roundup yet. There are so many old-school, inexpensive, non-chemical options readily available.
Old wives’ tale gardening trick that actually works:
Always plant lavender by your doors to ward off evil spirits (this has been a pretty happy little house for 30 years so who’s going to say it doesn’t work?) Coffee grinds to keep critters away.
Favorite gardening hack:
Growing marigolds with tomatoes to helps enrich the soil and deter pests; cardboard to suppress weeds when laying in new gardens.
Favorite way to bring the outdoors in.
Above: Found natural treasures on Alex’s fireplace mantel.
Cuttings from whatever is blooming outside. love the drama of the long arching canes of multiflora roses, so dramatic in our little cottage, or the tall stems of drying fennel and grasses, mixed with bits of nature, fallen birds nests or antlers shed from our local deer. Then there are the rocks, they are everywhere; collected from beach walks and travels, it’s a problem.
Every garden needs a…
A bit of white to contrast against the shades of layered greens, from variegated leaves to sweet autumn clematis, hydrangea ‘Limelight’. And a little bit of chocolate for contrast—I love the stark contrast against greens—chocolate cosmos, black cornflowers, hollyhocks ‘Blackknight’, coral bells.
Lots of flowers planted amongst the vegetables for the pollinators—particularly African blue basil—they love the blue flowers when it goes to seed and it smells so great when you brush up against it.
Favorite hardscaping material:
Above: River rocks line a planting border.
River rocks. Living with wetland conditions, we wanted a way to elevate our beds in a rambling, natural manner.
Tool you can’t live without:
Lindsey Taylor introduced me to my favorite Japanese hori hori knife a few years ago—so many uses. Sneerboer Narrow Perennial Spade is a recent purchase and a game-changer.
Go-to gardening outfit:
Vintage French work top I bought from Marston House years ago at a garden show pop-up, great pockets and faded fatigues. Gardenheir clogs on dry days and BOGS boots for the wet weather.
A trip to Daylesford in the Cotswolds and a spin through a few of the storied English gardens
Not-to-be-missed public garden/park/botanical garden:
Jardin du Plantes in Paris. And the transporting experience of Tokyo’s Nezu Museum garden + teahouse. I always welcome green refuge on busy work trips.
The REAL reason you garden:
It keeps me sane and nurtures my soul; providing much needed quiet and reflective time away from screens with my hands in the dirt.
Thanks so much, Alex! Follow her on Instagram @mybloomist.
We’ve enjoyed garden designer Lindsey Taylor‘s way with both words and flowers since 2013, when she was a contributor to this site. Recently, we admired her rambunctious cinderblock garden, teeming with tough, hard-wearing beauties, in Newburgh, NY, where she’s based. And just this past fall, we were captivated by her new book, Art in Flower, which collects 40 of the elegant floral arrangements she designed for her monthly Wall Street Journal column, “Flower School.” Each composition is paired with a famous work of art, as well as a short explanation of how the masterpiece inspired her design. It’s a telling conceit: For Lindsey, plants are her paints, and the garden, her canvas.
Her chosen medium is 3D and multi-sensory. “I once visited a garden designed by a very famous designer I like. I couldn’t figure out why I felt so uncomfortable in it until I realized that even though everything was blooming, there was no sound. No buzzing of insects or birds,” Lindsey recalls. “I later found out the client insisted on having the garden sprayed for bees (they are allergic), ticks, and mosquitoes. It was claustrophobic to be in and devastating to experience such a great landscape of pollinator plants in silence.”
Below, a portrait of an artist as a garden designer.
Photography by Lindsey Taylor, unless noted.
Above: “I have a natural tendency to let plants mingle and weave together, and duke it out amongst themselves. I like to tinker away at my own garden, as if it was a large never-finished abstract painting. I stand back, study it and keep going back in, adding a slash of color here and removing a brush stroke there—and eventually it all starts to sing together as it matures.” Photograph by Ngoc Minh Ngo.
Your first garden memory:
Picking daffodils with my Granny at their farm outside of Toronto. Narcissi and the many varieties to grow are really a favorite, particularly species and ones with finer foliage.
Above: In a walled garden in Hudson Highlands designed by Lindsey, a Damson plum tree enjoys a soft landing.
A garden needs to have a soul. It needs to move in the wind, change, have fragrance, feed the birds and other insects and critters, and breathe. When I visit a garden where too much control and need for perfection is in play, I find it unpleasant to be in. If it’s sprayed or watered to stay alive, or if it’s at odds with its environment, I’m not interested. All plants, of course, need a helpful hand with watering and weeding to get established in the first few years, but my goal is to let them sort it out happily on their own once they’ve settled in.
Currently in my own garden I’m healing the land from a recent building construction project. My objective is to merge the line between the cultivated and the natural areas and have the house sit quietly as if it were dropped from the sky and nestled in. I’m working with the existing soil, planting tightly to avoid bringing in mulch and using only wood chips from dead trees we had to clear on the property.
Plant that makes you swoon:
Above: Tall Angelica gigas.
Plants with fragrance. Plants that sway in the wind. Vertical plants that tower up through a dense planting. And plants that feed the birds who bring their precious song to a garden.
Plant that makes you want to run the other way:
Japanese knotweed and other invasive aggressive bullies.
Favorite go-to plant:
Above: A crowd of Viburnum ‘Mary Milton’, Hydrangea aspera, and Rosa ‘Cecile Brunner’ nearly obscures a door in the walled garden.
Plantswoman Flora Grubb is here to dispel rumors that she sold her beloved namesake nurseries in San Francisco and Marina del Rey. They are not under new ownership. “In fact, you can still find me working (like most nurserymen) at least fifty hours a week. I’m still both pulling weeds and poring over spreadsheets. My fingernails are still perpetually dirty,” she tells us. “Along with my business partner Saul Nadler, who co-founded the nursery with me twenty years ago, I do whatever it takes to keep my independent nursery growing.”
Thank goodness! For as long as our site has existed, we’ve been inspired by Flora and her keen eye for interesting plants (in particular succulents). Today, she’s sharing her thoughts on gardening, including why there’s no rest for the weary gardener in California and the reason she makes room for some non-natives in her landscape.
My first garden was a patch of Gerber Daisy grown against a scruffy rental house in Austin, Texas, where I grew up. My dad would take me and my four siblings to the nursery and let us each get one plant. I’ve been gardening ever since.
The account of a wonderful wholesale grower in New South Wales, Australia: @exotic_nurseries.
Describe in three words your garden aesthetic.
Above: Textures and shapes take center stage in her garden. From left are Acaciacognata ‘Cousin Itt’, the silvery Leucophytabrownii, Buxus ‘Green Mountain’, Ceanothusgriseus var. horizontalis ‘Diamond Heights’, Aeonium ‘Mint Saucer’, Santolina virens ‘Lemon Fizz’, and Peperomiaferreyrae.
Lush. Textured. Cohesive.
Plant that makes you swoon:
Cussonia. We grow cussonia from seed at our farms in the Rainbow Valley. We’re growing a few different types, and we’ve experimenting with raising them in our greenhouses for our customers to put in their homes as well as their gardens.
Plant that makes you want to run the other way:
After 20 years of being surrounded by thousands of plants every day, I’ll say… I just like plants. Plants I thought I didn’t care for have surprised me by turning up in places I don’t expect them looking perfectly lovely. What makes me want to run the other way are plant combinations. Mostly, multi-colored six packs of annual plants never end up looking beautiful in any context.
Favorite go-to plant:
Above: For Flora Grubb’s growing guide on Dudleya britonii, go here. Photograph via Flora Grubb Gardens website.
Dudleya britonii, a beautiful chalky white California native succulent.
Hardest gardening lesson you’ve learned:
In our coastal Californian climate, gardens don’t “rest” in the winter time, and neither can I. When we have mild and wet winters,the garden must not be ignored. The plants love the rain and the coastal California version of “cold” does not slow them down much. By the time the sun comes out in spring, the plants I’ve nurtured may be buried under plants I don’t like as much. The lesson: pick any dry-enough, warm-enough winter day and get out there!
Unpopular gardening opinion:
The beauty of the California garden comes from the liveliness that natives contribute when combined with the forms, colors, and wonder brought by well-adapted plants from around the world. For building resilience to climate change, particularly in the dense coastal cities where my customers live, “California Natives Only” is not a good strategy. This may seem self evident to some, but in some circles this is an unpopular opinion.
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.
David: Filter or weed fabric is an entire industry that, if I could, I would delete with the push of a button. Weeds go through it, it’s plastic, you always see it (and it’s ugly), and it impairs the ability of insects or worms to move through soil horizons, and that seems incredibly unkind.
Dawn: Impervious surfaces in general! We should really stop pouring concrete.
Old wives’ tale gardening trick that actually works:
Dawn: I talk and sing to my plants at home, and they’re happy.
Diego: Love your plants!
Favorite gardening hack:
Dawn: Sticking my finger in the soil seems to answer a lot of my client’s questions.
David: I love that answer, Dawn! I have a bathtub in my garden and I use it to water my Sycamore Trees (which like a bit of water). Feels like a solid hack to me.
Diego: Hire Carmen Orozco of Barranca Landscape. Everything comes out beautifully.
Every garden needs a…
Diego: A low-tech water fountain for birds and insects.
Dawn: A birdbath!
David: Well, I don’t want to ruin this, so I will also say birdbath, but it’s true—inviting wildlife into your garden is the ultimate baller move.
Favorite hardscaping material:
Dawn: Reclaimed brick! The classics never go out of style.
Diego: Urbanite (broken concrete). We’re increasingly trying to use recycled materials in our projects and urbanite transcends aesthetic worlds in a really cool way. We’re trying to learn how to build mostly native, spiritually Japanese gardens out of trash—that’s one of the present goals of the office.
Go-to gardening outfit:
Above: Terremoto’s Flap Hat is $43 at Plant Material.
Dawn: My old Terremoto shirt.
David: I have a flap hat that protects my red neck from getting even redder, and when I put it on and put glasses on, I go into GARDEN BEAST MODE.
On your wishlist:
Dawn: Owning a fucking house someday hopefully.
David: A small cabin in the woods next to a creek. Ideally with no cell reception.
Favorite nursery, plant shop, or seed company:
Above: Plant Material is the retail arm of Terremoto. Photograph by Caitlin Atkinson, courtesy of Terremoto.
David: Absolutely shameless plug alert, but Plant Material! It’s our Los Angeles nursery with three shops and an ecological point of view. And, of course, shout out to Theodore Payne and Artemisia Nursery. It’s a big city and we’re trying to push it in an environmentally positive direction together, which is lovely.
Dawn: N-K Bonsai Tree Nursery.
Diego: Plant Material!
David: Hey, Diego, you’re getting a raise—awesome answer!
Not-to-be-missed public garden/park/botanical garden:
Diego: Casa Azul, Frida Kahlo’s house in Mexico City.
David: California Scenario shreds. The Test Plots in Elysian Park (and everywhere) are a constant source of joy for me.
The REAL reason you garden:
Dawn: Mental health!
David: Yeah, kinda also mental health and well-being.
Diego: Community and bonding, with co-workers and soil.
Thank you, David, Dawn, and Diego! If you want to see what the team is up to, follow them @terremoto_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.
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.
For most people, getting photographed by legendary New York Times lensman Bill Cunningham was a source of pride. For Taylor Johnston, though, Cunningham’s shot of her installing the famous nasturtium vines at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum decades ago, led to a reckoning. Embarrassed by the outfit she wore that day, she decided she would “make the kinds of work clothing Bill and I adored—simple, utilitarian, handsome elements of a uniform,” she says. Those designs for herself have since grown into cult workwear label Gamine. Taylor’s first love, though, remains gardening. “I’ve been working with plants and in gardens for over 20 years—public and private projects, from building meadows in remote places to installing gardens at big city art museums. For the last seven years I’ve been toiling with esteemed nurseryman, Ed Bowen in our collaborative nursery, issima. It’s just the two of us and we propagate everything in house,” she says. Both Gamine and issima are based in Tiverton, RI.
Below, the former philosophy major shares the plant that never fails to stop her in her tracks, the best garden to visit in all of New England, and the most artful DIY seedling dibber we’ve ever seen.
Photography courtesy of issima, unless otherwise noted.
Above: Taylor at issima wearing Gamine’s Deck Sweater. All Gamine pieces are made in the USA. Photograph by Hope Millham.
Your first garden memory:
When I was little, I was “helping” my father clear the land around the house he built; the land was at one time an old orchard in this storied part of Maryland where the Underground Railroad ran through town. I found an antique diamond ring in the muck and ran to show my mom, who took it to an antique dealer who said it was incredibly old and likely slipped off a finger…. The mystery (both the dark and light sides of the equation) and curiosity of that encounter lingers and is forever a part of my connection to gardens. (I still have the ring.)
Garden-related book you return to time and again:
The garden literature of interest these days tends to be related to specific taxa we’re playing with at the nursery—Maurice Foster’s recent manuscript,The Hydrangea: A Reappraisal, and John Massey and Tomoo Mabuchi’s unbelievable tour of Hepatica, My World of Hepaticas. I will admit to occasionally picking up Katherine S. White, especially for her ramblings on nursery catalogs. A somewhat necessary reminder that I’m not doing something completely insane with my life.
Plant that makes you swoon:
Above: Sanguisorba ‘Drama Queen’
Sanguisorba ‘Drama Queen’—a selection made by my partner, Ed Bowen, when he was operating as a one-man show under the nursery name, Opus. Sanguisorba ‘Drama Queen’ was selected from var. parviflora, but with clear tenuifolia influence in its taller stature and longer inflorescences. It has an incredibly sturdy, upright habit with many pendulous white bottlebrush flowers on 4- to 6-foot stems in early summer. It’s easy and floriferous in a range of conditions, but especially where it’s not too wet or too dry. The plant is incredibly beautiful and as luck would have it, stubbornly slow to propagate. Every year when it flowers, it stops me in my tracks. At various points of the day I find myself standing in front of the planting admiring its dynamic movement in the breeze and the number of winged insects that hover in its ether.
Plant that makes you want to run the other way:
For the past few years, most Dahlias. It’s not that I dislike Dahlias, I just feel bludgeoned by their incessant presence. We can’t live on a diet of twinkies alone…
Gardening or design trend that needs to go:
Dogmatic thinking.
Favorite gardening hack:
Above: Her partner Ed artfully upcycled a dinner fork into a seedling pricker.
It’s probably too crass to say pee-cycling, so let’s instead go with any number of propagation tips and tricks I’ve picked up along the way, one of my favorites being the way Ed coils a fork’s prongs for pricking seedlings.
Favorite way to bring the outdoors in.
Above: Cut Sanguisorba cultivars in a vase. Photograph by Phillip Huynh.
Cut flowers. Nothing feels more luxurious than cutting a special bouquet from your own garden to bring indoors.
Every garden needs a…
Gardener. For without a gardener, a garden can’t exist. The impermanence of a garden is both vice and virtue.
Favorite hardscaping material:
Found and antique stone.
Tool you can’t live without:
Above: Taylor often uses her pencil to show scale in images of plants. Here, it’s placed on top of a Saxifraga ‘Master Blaster’, one of issima’s new offerings this year.
A pencil. A proper pencil is the best thing to write on plant tags if you need them to stay legible for many years. Every gardener I know has a little scribble sheet for notes/ideas–ink will bleed when it gets wet and unlike my notes app, a pencil doesn’t require a battery. Beyond the obvious uses, the tip of a pencil can push seeds that land in a pot too close together, and it’s the perfect scale in photos. In a pinch it can even hold my bun.
Favorite nursery, plant shop, or seed company:
The Sakonnet Plant Fair, which happens the first Saturday of May in Little Compton, RI. Just shy of 30 specialist nurseries gather on the town commons for an epic day of ornamental and culinary treasure.
Not-to-be-missed public garden/park/botanical garden:
Sakonnet Garden in Little Compton, Rhode Island—if you can only go to one garden in New England, this is the one.
Thanks so much, Taylor! You can follow her on Instagram @issima_ and @gamine_co.
As a regular reader, you may already be familiar with Perfect Earth Project, as Gardenista has partnered with them on an ongoing series about nature-based, toxic-free gardening. But you may not know much about the group’s tour-de-force founder, Edwina von Gal. The venerable landscape designer-turned-sustainable gardening advocate has been calling for less lawn, more wildlife for decades, via both her projects for clients and her nonprofit. She is currently on the board of What Is Missing, Maya Lin’s multifaceted media artwork about the loss of biodiversity, and an honorary trustee of the Native Plant Trust.
Edwina, who resides in Springs, NY, recently responded to our Quick Takes questionnaire from her retreat, Cocoloche, in Panama: “I built it with minimal resources to explore just that. How could I keep my footprint light and—with good design and the materials at hand—make a place that would engage and awe people?” It’s her philosophy to garden design as well.
Read on to learn Edwina’s favorite hardscaping material (hint: it’s not hard), her go-to work pants (we want them now, too), and why she thinks it’s imperative for designers to push back on client’s misguided requests.
Above: Edwina counts Cindy Sherman, Calvin Klein, and Ina Garten among her clients. Photograph courtesy of Perfect Earth Project.
Your first garden memory:
The patch of silver dollar plant (Lunaria annua) that always returned in a spot by our swing set. I looked for it every year, and would open it and spread the seeds without realizing I was its dispersal agent.
Above: Edwina visiting one of her projects. Photograph by Allan Pollok-Morris.
Experimental. Exuberant. Engaging.
Plant that makes you swoon:
Sourwood (Oxydendrum arboretum). It blooms late in the summer and then follows the show with brilliant fall color. It is relatively small, so it won’t outgrow its space or out-compete the plants beneath it. Since it is a southern plant, it is a bit of assisted migration for me, providing familiar blooms for wildlife that are moving north to escape the heat.
Plant that makes you want to run the other way:
Crepe myrtle (Lagerstroemia). It’s overused and under-useful for biodiversity. One good thing about it, though, is that in the conventional landscapes where it is so popular, it doesn’t need to be sprayed with pesticides.
Favorite go-to plant:
Above: Edwina can’t get enough of spotted beebalm (Monarda punctata). Photograph by Edwina von Gal.
Monarda punctata. It tends to be short lived—it might act like an annual—but I am willing to replant it as I never tire of its odd combination of wacky complicated bloom and understated presence. Not to mention how many pollinators love it, too.
Hardest gardening lesson you’ve learned:
When to stop.
Unpopular gardening opinion:
Designs that are harmful, but the designer does it anyway, because it is “what the client wants.” We are hired for our expertise. But how can we, the ones who are expected to know, allow even one more garden to be harmful to the environment and the people who enjoy them?
Gardening or design trend that needs to go:
Monocultures: large swaths of one plant.
Every garden needs a…
Above: A place for thirsty wildlife in Edwina’s own garden in Springs, NY. Photograph by Edwina von Gal.
Claire Ratinon is a self-described “career changer grower,” a former documentary producer who fell hard for gardening after a chance visit to the Brooklyn Grange (a rooftop farm in New York) led her to trade in the cameras and lights for compost and loppers. She went on to grow edible plants in a range of roles, including growing organic produce for the Ottolenghi restaurant, Rovi. Today, she lives in rural East Sussex, where she finally gets to tend her own vegetable patch. She writes about her gardening journey in a regular column for the Guardian’s Saturday magazine and in books, the latest being Unearthed: On Race and Roots, and How the Soil Taught Me I Belong, a memoir that explores how working with the land has connected her to her Mauritian roots. Last month, Claire debuted her online course, “Grow Your Own Food,” via the Create Academy.
Read on to find out why the organic gardener and writer thinks “growing plants is the only thing that genuinely makes sense” these days.
Photography courtesy of The Create Academy, unless otherwise noted.
Above: Claire shares her gardening wisdom in her columns for TheGuardian. You can find them here.
Your first garden memory:
I’m a career changer grower, so although I have early memories of the sunny, blousy marigolds and fragrant roses that my mother grew in the garden where I grew up, my most important plant memory was stepping out of an elevator onto the rooftop farm, Brooklyn Grange, to see rows of crops basking in the sun. The orientation of my life changed in that moment.
Garden-related book you return to time and again:
Joy Larkcom’s Grow Your Own Vegetables is a bible for vegetable growing. I go back to it to double -check myself all the time and direct people towards it if they’re looking for guidance.
Instagram account that inspires you:
A Growing Culture shares fascinating and important content speaking to global issues around agriculture, food sovereignty, and land justice.
Plant that makes you swoon:
Above: A July harvest of tomatillos. Photograph via @claireratinon.
Currently, I’m eagerly awaiting the return of the tomatillos. We grew them on the farm where I work last season and the plants yielding an abundance of delicious fruit so I ate them pretty much every day. I’m hoping to do the same this summer!
Plant that makes you want to run the other way:
Can’t get on board with celeriac.. sorry!
Favorite go-to plant:
Above: Claire practices the “no-dig” gardening approach, mulching her vegetable beds with a layer of compost every year and leaving it for the soil life to incorporate.
Tomatoes. Not exactly original but homegrown are simply better than anything I’ve ever bought in a greengrocer or supermarket. I grow the varieties ‘Black Cherry’ and ‘Purple Calabash’ every year.
Unpopular gardening opinion:
That most edible plants can’t be grown indoors. Not really an opinion as much as it’s a fact, but people don’t like to hear it!
Hardest gardening lesson you’ve learned:
Above: Claire attempted to grow margoz, also known as bitter melon, a vegetable she grew up eating in her Mauritian household. “These two are off in the post to my mum and dad and maybe next year I’ll do better than two small bitter melons,” she wrote in an Instagram post. Photograph via @claireratinon.
That no matter how much you know, how hard you try, how desperately you want it, some crops just won’t thrive under your care that season and the causes of that failure will often be beyond your control—so it’s not worth getting too upset about.
We didn’t know we needed quietly stylish workwear and Italian garden clogs in our lives until Alan Calpe and Christopher Crawford’s Gardenheir came along. Now, like many others who’ve discovered their website or wandered into their chic shop in Windham, NY, we’re obsessed. The pair founded the business “after becoming more and more consumed as we made our first garden in Upstate New York,” says Alan, who has a background in visual arts and art education; Christopher comes from fashion design.Next up for the enterprising couple: “We recently purchased the property next door and much of it is quite wet land, so we are slowly working towards creating a wild, meandering bog garden.”
Ready to find out what they wear when they garden (spoiler alert: it’s not Crocs) and how they use dryer sheets to fend off bugs?
Above: Christopher and Alan (right) in their moonlight garden.
Your first garden memory:
Alan: One of my oldest friends’ mom was an avid gardener and made a beautifully jungly Florida garden that welcomed you through the front door. I wish I could’ve told her just how much of an influence she was, from peeking into her floral arranging workshop to her once making me a gift of a large strawberry pot dripping of herbs to accompany me to college. I’d consider it my first garden, actually.
Book/show/movie/art that has influenced your work:
Christopher: Early on, reading other’s accounts of making their first gardens, like Margery Fish’s We Made a Garden and Jamaica Kincaid’s My Garden. The unknowing, the failures and pleasures, resonated with us as we fumbled through our beginning gestures.
Alan: Gilles Clément’s The Planetary Garden and Other Writingsshapes a philosophical approach to gardening that I think about often. There’s still much of his work that I don’t think I completely grasp, but it challenges us to look deeply, think more deeply, into the decisions we make in the garden.
Garden-related book you return to time and again:
Alan: We have a copy of Derek Jarman’s Modern Nature in plain view in our home. Because it’s written as diaristic entries arranged through the passing of a year, we often will pick it up to read the chapter that coincides with our own time, to bring him and his garden at Dungeness close to us.
Alan: Iris fulva (copper iris). A native iris with a perfectly simple form and seductive rusty tones.
Plant that makes you want to run the other way:
Christopher: Burdocks, Japanese knotweed.
Favorite go-to plant:
Above: Ornamental grasses planted in their landscape include Deschampsia cespitosa and the Veronicastrum virginicum ‘Album’.
Christopher: Still a sucker for heirloom roses even if they’re finicky in our garden. Pycnanthemum (mountain mints) for sure.
Alan: Also, our garden would be nothing without the structural ornamental grasses.
Most dreaded gardening chore:
Christopher: Picking off Japanese beetles.
Unpopular gardening opinion:
Alan: We have a hard time getting rid of plants that we’ve fallen out of favor with or might not even be thriving so well. It’s sort of like a bad tattoo that you refuse to remove because it reminds you of a particular time in your life. (Even if it’s relegated to a far-off corner somewhere!)
…water feature that stays accessible, with at least a portion of the surface unfrozen, even in winter. The power of water to support increased diversity is unmatched in the garden; from dragonflies to amphibians to birds and mammals, the water garden is where the action is. My two in-ground pools were one of the first things I created here, and thanks in large part to them 70ish species of birds visit regularly, for instance.
Tool you can’t live without:
Why over-effort by using a too-big pruner when for most jobs a smaller, lightweight one will do? ARS HP-300LDX stainless steel needle-nose fruit pruners, meant for working in vineyards and orchards, are my hand-saving go-to for most daily chores. I have a pair of lightweight, scaled-down aluminum loppers, too, for making bigger cuts.
Go-to gardening outfit:
My yoga gear from 20 years ago, rubber boots, and un-fancy gloves with nitrile-coated palms and fingers.
Favorite nursery, plant shop, or seed company:
Cannot name just one, but I am a longtime champion of farm-based, organic seed companies—people who grow some or all of the seed they sell, and are happy to tell you who grew the rest, and how. In this age of such terrifying consolidation of the seed industry into the hands of a few giant companies who regard and patent it as intellectual property, these often small “seedkeepers” in the organic movement are where I see hope.
On your wishlist:
Above: Amsonia tabernaemontana. Photograph by Kerry Woods via Flickr.
After reading Mt. Cuba Center’s just-published Trial Garden research on all the different native bluestars, or Amsonia, I almost want them all. Beautiful flowers, and graceful foliage with great fall color—plus they are super-tough and long-lived.
In their New Jersey garden, my friends Louis Bauer and Ken Druse use columnar trees really effectively—both conifers and deciduous ones such as European beech—and I’m trying to identify a couple of spots here for such distinctive exclamation points.
Not-to-be-missed public garden/park/botanical garden:
In just 10ish years, the historic estate called Untermyer Gardens Conservancy in Yonkers, NY, has risen from the ashes, thanks to a crew of artistic and energetic horticulturists. Breathtaking. Speaking of transforming historic estates, Stoneleigh in Villanova, PA, is being transformed with a natives-only mission—unusual in such a formal setting, and very exciting.
The REAL reason you garden:
Above: In The Backyard Parables, Margaret writes about why gardening is about so much more than plants.
I always say that I garden because I cannot help myself. It’s not about outdoor decorating for me (though I do think the yard looks better for the efforts). More powerful, though, I experience the garden as part meditative space, part science lab. It’s a place where I slow down and where my curiosity is constantly aroused—and not just about plants, but birds, moths, lichen, you name it, and how all the pieces of the food chain and the ecosystem fit together.
You may remember Summer Rayne Oakes from her incredible, plant-filled Brooklyn apartment that went viral in 2016. Since then, “I set out on a mission to bring people closer to plants by bringing plants closer to them,” she says, via her YouTube channel “Plant One On Me” and her Houseplant Masterclass series. During the COVID pandemic, she and her friends decided to buy a former plant nursery in the Finger Lakes region of New York, “with the goal of turning it into a communal homestead and botanical oasis.” They document their progress on their new channel Flock.
Summer shared her plant wisdom in our newest book Remodelista: The Low-Impact Home. Here, she goes deeper, revealing the tool she can’t live without, her favorite method of deterring weeds, and more.
Above: Summer and her friends are currently transforming 90 acres in the Finger Lakes region into a communal homestead.
My mom kept the most beautiful flower gardens on the street, and we had a large veggie garden and small orchard, too. Towards the back of our land, we had gargantuan rhubarbs that grew around the red currants. I would hide under the rhubarb leaves, like they were folious umbrellas. And I would break the stems and eat them raw—even though they were quite sour. My mother would make French-style crepes with the currants too, which were my favorite. And how can I forget the lilacs! My bedroom was on the second floor of the house and every summer, the lilacs bloomed outside my window and the warm breezes would blow the scent all through my bedroom. It was decadent. Sadly when we left that house, I asked my mother if we could take the lilac bushes, but I would have to wait when I was adult to enjoy the scent of lilacs again.
Book/show/movie/art that has influenced your work:
I think Rick Darke’s and Doug Tallamy’s book, The Living Landscape, really encapsulated creating a garden that selflessly extends beyond yourself to one that focuses on promoting biodiversity and maintaining ecosystem function. Piet Oudolf’s landscape creations are also so soothing to the eye, and I find myself referencing his textures and painterly approach to landscaping.
Garden-related book you return to time and again:
Perhaps not gardening books per se, but I’m constantly reaching for my pollinator identification guides and caterpillar books, for which I have several, because I’m always seeing never-before-seen insects in my garden, especially now that I’ve been focusing on planting insect host plants.
Plant that makes you swoon:
Above: The pollinator garden at Flock.
Symphyotrichum ericoides ’Snow Flurry’; Muhlenbergia capillaris; Eragrosis spectabilis; and All things Liatris, including Liatris microcephala.
Plant that makes you want to run the other way:
Reynoutria japonica (Japanese knotweed) and vinca vine.
Most dreaded gardening chore:
Removing grass from garden edges.
Unpopular gardening opinion:
Above: No space between plants = no space for weeds.
Don’t follow the plant spacing recommendations on the back of plant tags. I like to plant close together to suppress unchosen plants early on and create a carpet of foliage.
The one thing you wish gardeners would stop doing:
Planting only non-native species.
Old wives’ tale gardening trick that actually works:
Composted manure brings big veggies!
Favorite gardening hack:
Plant densely to avoid weeds, plant diversely to bring life.
This just in: We’re excited to announce the launch of Quick Takes, a brand-new subscriber-only Sunday column appearing on both Remodelista and Gardenista.
Above: Who will we be chatting with in Quick Takes? The shopkeeper/tastemaker/designer behind this considered kitchen, for one. Find out who this Sunday.
Each week, we’ll ask top designers, influencers, shopkeepers, and tastemakers for their insider dos and don’ts, faves and raves, from best house upgrades and design tricks to gardening advice and what’s on the bedside table. We kicked off the new series on Sunday: On Remodelista, trendsetter Kai Avent-deLeon shared her go-to sheets and best thing to bring to a party; and over on Gardenista, landscape designer Molly Sedlacek revealed the out-of-print gardening book she returns to time and again and the one plant that turns her off.
Above: Gardenista’s next Quick Takes respondent is building a communal homestead on 90 acres in upstate New York. Check the site this Sunday to learn who she is.
Quick Takes will be free and available to all through the month of March; after that, it’ll be reserved for paid subscribers—so if you like what you see this month, consider upgrading to a paid subscription to keep reading. (One subscription works for both sites.) Subscribers also have access to full-text newsletters, delivered daily, as well as an ad-free viewing experience. A paid subscription is $9.99, paid monthly, or $59.99 paid yearly (a 50 percent savings) and helps support our team and keep our sites going.
Whether you become a subscriber or not, we’re so grateful for your continued readership and support all these years. Thanks for following along.
N.B.: Have someone you’d like to see featured in Quick Takes? Let us know in the comments.
