Wild by Design

Round 6! The three Bens and a Lindsey join forces once again to encourage you to take the leap and start (or grow) a natural garden design business. Just in time for spring! 🌱

Whether your ambitions are big or small, whether you’re just starting, or thinking of starting, or have already started but don’t know where to go next, we’ll peel back the curtain and show you how we each operate our unique businesses. We need more of us doing this work, and we’re here to help! Just as we’ve helped over 300 gardener-entrepreneurs so far.

You’ll get four hours of us, covering topics like business formation, pricing, finding and working with clients and all the while balancing the fact that we’re working with living things and seasons and the unpredictability of nature. There’s lots of Q&A along the way and a recording link for a month afterward. PLUS a snazzy 89 page manual with even more detail and resources.

Join us and grow a garden business this year! Let’s make 2026 positive and hopeful again. 🌼 🪏 🌳

Register at the link in the bio!

The calendar has flipped, it’s a new gardening year, so let’s get planning.

Join and I for a webinar on January 22 where we’ll discuss our experiences, from North Carolina and eastern Ontario, designing, planting and - crucially - managing natural gardens. We’ll each highlight a selection of gardens from small to large, sunny to shady, and urban to rural to provide some inspiration, ideas and actionable strategies for as many different home landscapes as possible.

Our gracious host Benjamin Vogt will then moderate what promises to be a lively Q&A to cap things off.

These are the depths of winter. Plan now, and plant with reckless abandon this spring!

Follow the link in my bio to register.

Reflecting on the year that was, as we approach the end of 2025. Though it came late in the season, a milestone highlight was getting to see my work in print for the first time, thanks to , and the fine folks . Years of design thinking, planting and gardening at some favourite projects described in thoughtful words and captured in beautiful images. I’m honoured to be included among a wonderful group of garden friends and visionaries who have, and continue to, inspire me.

Thanks as always to the support of my clients who agreed to share their private oases with the world, and who continue to give me the freedom and time to garden in an experimentally wild naturalistic way.

Probably too late for your holiday book shopping, but there’s lots of winter reading time left. Buy from your local bookstore!

My webinar for the Perennial Plant Association is Tuesday afternoon! 1:00pm (EST) via Zoom, follow the link in my bio to register! It will be available as a recording if you’re not able to join the party live.

This will be a deep dive into the under-discussed world of caring for and managing naturalistic perennial planting. Designing is one thing, but what happens when you set the wheels in motion? How do you intervene and why? We’ll explore some of my longest ongoing projects and how they’ve evolved (in good ways and bad - we only learn when we make mistakes). In the end, better gardens have emerged. Hope you can join the conversation! 🌱

The season of seedheads and long shadows.

Landscape architecture:
Landscape construction: Schoonhoven SLM
Architecture: Harry Morison Lay Architect
Walls: and
Planting design and installation: Me

We’re baaaack! Ready to take the leap and build a natural garden design business this winter? The three Bens (Vogt, Futa and O’Brien) and one Lindsey are here to help, for the fifth time!

On October 14, over the course of four hours (9:30-1:30 EST), we’ll take a deep dive into our independent businesses and help you start or build yours. We’ll cover the nuts and bolts, lessons we’ve learned (and continue to learn) along the way, and answer as many questions as humanly possible. We’re here to be open books and share as much as we can to empower you and help foster more businesses like our own. Join us! 🌱

An update from an autumnal meadow on a glorious day.

This year I experimented with meadow cutback and management strategies here. In the upper meadow we cut the previous year’s growth down to the ground in early spring, and then mowed it at the highest mower setting until the beginning of June. This strategy sacrificed early flowering but it’s now a superbloom of Aster, goldenrod, brown eyed Susan, boneset et al. Even in spite of this summer’s prolonged drought.

The lower meadow was cut back, but leaving the previous year’s stems standing at 18” tall, as nesting habitat for insects. It was never touched again. Much taller (6-7’ vs 2-3’), much more reed canary grass, but better spring flowering and early spring nesting cover for birds, while the other meadow was being mown. A patchwork of management, with pros and cons to each. It’s a massive privilege to have clients willing to experiment and use their landscapes as laboratories. 🌱

A week of farm work last week. The garden has perked up after a couple of welcome, desperately needed rains, just in time for fall planting season.

Continuing to edit the meadow gardens by de-grassing some areas to create a more visually open, undulating and texturally varied planting. I want the Molinia and Panicums to read as punctuation points, with air space around them. Calamagrostis brachytricha has been removed completely. Not because it was unhappy here, but visually it occupied the same layer in the planting and the overall effect had become an impenetrable wall of grass. Now there’s space to play and add new things that weren’t on my radar when these gardens were planted 5+ years ago.

The woodland garden ticks along happily. Green and calm and serene.

I’m forever grateful for being able to learn, experiment and play in this garden for over a decade. Reminded of this after showing around this week. I’ll be sharing more about what I’ve learned, and continue to learn, at the farm in a webinar later this fall for the (link in bio).

Checking in on a one year old garden, to see how it’s weathering this summer’s deep, prolonged drought. Some watering to keep things going, some weeding (but less than in traditional rich soils, thanks to the sand or gravel mulches), but worth the effort to create a refuge of life amid an otherwise nearly flowerless, arid landscape. The Calamint, Alliums, Agastache ‘Black Adder’ and Scabiosa ochroleuca must seem like an oasis in a desert for the local pollinators. Lovingly cared for by keen clients, which always yields the best results, especially in a tough gardening year.

Landscape construction: Schoonhoven SLM
Landscape design and planting installation: me
Gardening:
Architecture:

Earlier this week, peak summer in the garden in South Bay. Deep fertile soil and (full disclosure) some supplemental watering have helped the garden through a perilously dry month. Rudbeckia maxima taking over from Cephalaria as the tall jungly emergent plant, with a summer mix of Alliums, Coreopsis, Rudbeckia etc covering ground beneath.

The meadows are coming into their prime too, as we experiment again this year with different mowing regimes. One area is cut back in spring and allowed to grow. The other area is mown regularly at a high setting until the end of May and then allowed to grow. In the past this hasn’t made a hugely noticeable difference, but this year with the dry conditions the cut meadow is much shorter. Hopefully we haven’t compromised flowering too much, but this is why you run the experiment.

The Echinacea variations at the Community Living gravel garden. Generations of hybrid seedlings from the originally planted species, appearing in random places, mostly at the edges. All complemented by the glorious fluff from Cotinus ‘Young Lady’, an amazingly drought tolerant plant in this hot dry summer.

Peak midsummer madness in an adolescent garden this week, with Echinacea pallida, E. paradoxa and E. ‘Pixie Meadowbrite’ all going gloriously haywire. The garden straddles and separates different terraces and outdoor living spaces around a beautifully built new home that looks as if it’s lived in this landscape for a century. A fantastic project with a great team:

Landscape architecture:
Landscape construction: Schoonhoven SLM
Architecture: Harry Morison Lay Architect
Dry stone walls: and
Planting design and installation: Me