Adam Woodruff LLC

https://www.bhg.com/landscaping-redesign-mistakes-11850778

Redesigning Your Yard? Avoid These 5 Common Landscaping Mistakes, Say the Pros These smart tips from professional garden designers will help prevent you from making a costly backyard blunder.

Before plants, there's pattern.

Pattern is the underlying geometry—the quiet scaffold that gives a planting order before a single species is chosen. It's not always visible in the finished garden, but it's always there.

Without it, naturalistic planting can feel random. With it, even the most layered, intermingled composition holds together. You might not see the pattern. But you feel it.

This is the first layer I develop—the map of movement and structure that the plants will eventually inhabit.

Landscape architecture by Matthew Cunningham Landscape Design LLC.

Naturalistic planting doesn't require a naturalistic setting.

This approach isn't limited to meadows or large rural properties. Here, the same techniques—layered planting, seasonal movement, intermingled species—sit against a stone balustrade, manicured turf, and crisp bed lines.

The hardscape and lawn aren't competing with the planting. They're framing it. Structure gives wild beauty a place to land.

If you have architecture, edges, and turf, you have a frame. The planting can still move.

Sometimes plants are the solution.

Jones Road is 20,000 square feet of planting—no designed terraces, no elaborate infrastructure. Just grasses establishing rhythm. Perennials creating density. Shrubs anchoring the view. The planting shapes the space.

The site asked for it: a ridgeline overlooking pastures and woodlands. Clients who wanted immersion. Anything more would have competed with what was already there.

Jones Road has appeared in several books and magazines as an example of matrix-based planting and naturalistic design—including Landscape Planting Design, Planting in a Post-Wild World, Gardens Illustrated, and Fine Gardening, among others.

How do you develop a planting scheme? It starts with the site—light, soil, moisture, hardiness. Then atmosphere: what should this space feel like? I source precedent images, usually from naturally occurring plant communities. A woodland edge. A meadow.

But selecting plants is only part of it. There's pattern—the underlying geometry that gives spatial order. There's compositional technique: intermingling species, planning for seasonal dynamics, balancing height and structure, managing rhythm and repetition. These are the moves that turn a plant list into a living composition.

Research shapes everything. I search image libraries—GAP Gardens, Marianne Majerus, Clive Nichols—to study combinations. I rely on plant trials from Mt. Cuba Center and Chicago Botanic Garden to guide cultivar selection. When working in a new region, I visit botanical gardens and nurseries to see what thrives. Sometimes I recommend a trial garden—testing plants on site before committing to a full scheme.

From there, I build a collage to visualize how species will work together before a single plant goes in the ground.

For more on the frameworks and techniques behind my work, visit the Planting Philosophy page. Link in bio.

Image: Redstone Lane. Collaboration with landscape architect Matthew Cunningham.

A few of you asked about matrix planting after the last post. Worth going deeper.

In the wild, plants form communities. They layer vertically—ground covers below, seasonal perennials through the middle, structure above. They share space, compete for it, support each other. No mulch. No gaps.

Thomas Rainer and Claudia West lay it out in Planting in a Post-Wild World—a framework for designing plant communities rather than plant collections. You work in layers: ground cover that suppresses weeds and holds moisture, seasonal plants that carry color and movement, structural plants that anchor the composition year-round.

The result is a planting that functions. It fills in, knits together, evolves. Less maintenance, more resilience, and a cohesion you can't get by placing plants one at a time.

Redstone Lane is built this way. If you want to understand the approach more deeply, the book is essential.