Dearest Reader,

What a lively discussion! And so many poll participants! My last column really hit a chord and I was overjoyed. Thank all of you who participated.

For example, responding to my statement that “Gardening exotic plants in North America requires much more labor, knowledge, and inputs for less satisfying results [than in the U.K.],” Alexandra from the Misplanted Substack responded, “YES! … Because it’s a design mismatch!” I so agree. I delve deeper into the burden of our horticultural legacy in “Why?” below.

And almost 500 of you answered the poll, confirming a slight bias for strolling counterclockwise (59%) vs. clockwise (41%) around our yards. According to researchers, it’s a uniquely human biomechanical asymmetry, which is stronger in young people. Like the majority of you, Pete and I stroll our yard counterclockwise—and I’m sharing a video of our circuit in “Wow!” But, like many of you, we also like to shake it up, walking the opposite direction to experience our garden from a completely different perspective.

But the comments I’ve been ruminating about are the responses to my request for turf removal recommendations, because the fan favorite method is my least favorite. Readers like covering an area of lawn with wood chips and planting into them, called “sheet mulching” or “the lasagna method.” I dislike this method partly because, as reader Kai said, “I have a huge fear of jumping worms.” I also want my herbaceous plants to spread as quickly as possible and wood chips inhibit this spread.

When challenged, wood chip fan Amanda—who keeps excellent records—says aggressive forbs (Monarda fistulosa, Zizia aurea, Solidago rigida, Rudbeckias, and Violas) have spread, but others not so much. She expects less aggressive forbs will spread when the chips break down, but that can take many years.

Which brings me to the main reason I dislike the wood chip method: I DETEST THE LOOK OF MULCH. And thick layers of wood chips look and act like other mulches. This is an aesthetic preference, not an ecological imperative; wood chips are ecologically superior to bark mulch, though the addition so much organic material is unnecessary. I would much rather see turfgrass than mulch in my establishing perennial beds and rely on the same species thriving in Amanda’s wood chips to eventually outcompete the turfgrasses.

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You could say mine is a more relaxed approach. I allow many volunteers to persist in my beds, while removing others, depending on my aesthetic goals, as well as their invasiveness. I encourage violets everywhere, which another wood chip fan works hard to eliminate. But, frankly, my antipathy to mulch makes me anxious, requiring all my mindfulness skills and emotional self-restraint to keep my blood from boiling during Pete and my constitutionals around our Rhode Island neighborhood.

Having tried them all, my favorite method of turf removal is not to remove the turf, but to plant into it instead. However, as my late father often said, “De gustibus non disputandum est.” (In matters of taste, there is no dispute.)

—Heather

Why, How, Wow!

Why? The burden of our horticultural legacy

When evaluating gardening practices—like the turf removal methods—I try to think like an ecosystem, not like a farmer. And consult original research. Because, unfortunately, most of what we learned about gardening growing up—even organic gardening and even today from AI and the internet—is toxic, wasteful, or counterproductive. If we want joyful, easy-care yards that are healthy for ourselves and other living things, we have to forget a lot of what we think we know about gardening. So here are my takes on various old precepts, based on research. I look forward to hearing your thoughts in the comments.

Let’s start with, “Till the soil so roots can penetrate easily.” Forget it. In fact, half of U.S. farmers don’t even till these days. Tilling destroys soil structure and encourages erosion. Plant roots—especially native plant roots—don’t need our help; they evolved to work their way through the soil.

Ever hear this one? “Your USDA hardiness zone indicates what will thrive in your yard.” Forget it. Hardiness zones merely indicate the extreme minimum winter temperature. They don’t reflect rainfall, length of dry periods, high temperatures, or numerous other environmental conditions that affect plant survival. For example, Zone 10 includes both Los Angeles and coastal Sarasota, Florida. The plants that thrive without intervention L.A.’s 14 inches of annual rainfall are completely different from those that thrive in Sarasota’s 52 inches of rain. On the other hand, if something’s native to your area, you know it evolved to deal with the general weather conditions there.

How about this? “Plants need plenty of space and sunlight.” Forget it. Plants evolved and thrive in cooperative communities, packed closely together—as in a prairie—or filling mostly shady vertical layers from the ground to the canopy—as in a forest. While you’re at it, forget the fundamental idea of nature as unfettered competition. Plants actually share food among each other via vast mycorrhizal fungi networks. And after a fire or other disturbance, early succession plants shade more tender, slower-growing species, protecting them from harsh sunlight.

And this? “Plants need fertilizer.” Forget it. They don’t even need compost. At least, not if you don’t remove their sources of nutrients by harvesting them to eat or removing dead stalks and leaves. Myriad organisms in natural ecosystems decompose dead plant material and return nutrients to the soil to nourish new plants. Amending soil with organic matter, topsoil, and fertilizers is a traditional horticultural practice that’s counterproductive in a native garden. Amendments encourage weeds and can super-size native plants, causing them to flop over.

As an aside, the Brits still have a mania for amending or replacing soil in order to grow exotic plants—including American plants, including in “naturalistic” styles. For example, five inches of sand was spread over a former building site to create the prairie above. And to create the the Oudolf garden pictured below, “The highly fertile soil was changed out at the start for poorer soil, an expensive option not open to many people.” (The English Garden)

You’ve heard, “Organic pesticides are safe?” Forget it. Naturally derived pesticides may be safer for human consumption, but most kill insects indiscriminately. And insects, especially caterpillars, are the base of our terrestrial ecosystem. No caterpillars, no terrestrial birds, for starters. Plus, insects are beautiful in their own right (happy National Moth Week, everyone!).

These and more traditional horticultural precepts reflect an agricultural model. Forget all that! Sustainable landscaping is different. Even if you have a vegetable garden, most of the other plants in your yard are not crops. So there’s no reason to put in the work, resources, or harmful chemicals to make each plant a perfect specimen.

And that brings me to slut-shaming plants that “seed around” or are “aggressive.” These are the plants I love most! We need these plants to outcompete invasives and replace sections of turf. Replacing half the lawn in the average American residential lot (14,000 square feet) requires about 5,000 plants. Bring on the yarrow, bee balms, mountain mints, black-eyed Susans!

When you think like an ecosystem, you think in terms of nurturing a community. It’s a much less stressful way to manage your piece of land: You’ll celebrate, rather than stress, when you see holes in leaves; you’re feeding caterpillars. You’ll welcome the autumn leaves that fall on your garden; they’ll enrich your soil. You’ll chill when you see aphids; ladybird beetles and parasitic wasps will take care of them. You’ll even embrace a dead tree, knowing that its contribution to the community will be as great when it’s dead as when it lived.

How: Turf removal methods continued

Like many readers, I’ve used all the turf removal methods and, as Kristine commented, none is perfect. She recommends Xerces’s 48-page Organic Site Preparation Guide, with pros and cons of each method summarized in this Comparative Overview.

My own favorite, especially for shade, is not included in the Xerces guide. Here’s how solsticecrown timidly described this approach:

I’m a novice with no idea if it going to work, but I had a bare area under my oak with grass majorly struggling to grow and few invasive (yet). I couldn’t afford … plugs throughout and didn’t want to leave it vulnerable to the invasives (creeping bellflower, gout weed, creeping Charlie) that eye any bare spot they can find, so I decided to just put the plugs (carexes, wild geranium, wild strawberries, black cohosh, wild ginger, a few nannyberry bushes…) that I got into the bare spots, stop mowing, let the oak leaves fall and see what happens!

Kristine, a chip method fan, had some success with another variation of the plant-into-turf method:

Scalp the grass and plant shrubs… I discovered this advice from CSU Extension in one of the more southern (drier, hotter) counties in Colorado. Basically, mow your grass super low then plant (native) shrubs and water them only at the base. It was okay-ish. I added mulch after a while.

Finally, giving the wood chip method fans equal time, here is Amanda’s version, which in three years resulted in a front yard “lush with native plants and has practically no grass or weeds.”

1) Mow your lawn down to the lowest possible setting.

2) Sign up for ChipDrop at https://getchipdrop.com/. This free service connects landscapers who have tons (literally) of wood chips to get rid of with gardeners who want them. It works best if you have a driveway where they can dump a massive quantity of chips. The chips may arrive unexpectedly, so be on the alert!

3) Spread the chips in a layer about 4-6 inches thick all over your mowed lawn. My understanding is that it is NOT necessary to spread cardboard or plastic or newspaper over the lawn before laying down the chips, and that in fact, it is better to just put the chips directly over the grass, because that allows air and water to percolate down into the soil.

4) Do nothing for a few months, while the grass decomposes and the chips slowly begin to decompose too.

5) Plant your native plugs directly into the chips, ideally in the fall -- as long as the bottoms of their roots are in the soil, they should be fine.

Wow! Walk with me?

Yesterday, Pete and I hosted forty or so neighbors in our purple parterre as one leg of a four-stop “porch crawl.” I was hoping some of them would love the look of our yard and want to plant more natives in their yards. And it worked! We received lots of compliments and questions, so I’m hoping we’ve sparked interest in ecological landscaping.

I wanted to share the garden with you, too, so I made this video of my daily stroll—which I do multiple times a day, especially after meals and during writing breaks. A UK meta-analysis found that just five minutes in nature boosts self esteem, and five minutes strolling the circuit of our yard certainly boosts mine:)

We started transforming it four years ago and have gradually replaced turf with native plants a section at a time. In case you’re wondering, our turf removal methods included a sod cutter, solarization, and planting directly into the turf.

Wildr Places News

Last week, both Joe Gardener and Gardenista’s Laura Fenton featured interviews with my daughter Zoe about the Wildr Places app. They both love the app, especially the “Places nearby” feature. As Joe said,

I found out when I was on the app... there’s quite a few people around me that are already on the app and submitting their photos. So I have a few neighbors I need to meet based on that.—Joe Gardener Podcast, Wildr Places App Offers Ecological Gardeners Guidance and Motivation

And Laura took action:

When I saw that no one in my area had posted yet, I decided to flip my profile to public in the hopes of encouraging other gardeners to do the same.—Laura Fenton, How Ecologically Healthy Is Your Garden? There’s an Easy Way to Find Out

This is exciting because research shows seeing someone nearby already doing it is one of the strongest motivators of environmental behaviors. It’s also just fun to look at what others are doing (especially when it seems as if all your neighbors are using mow and blow crews that isolate plants in piles of mulch, ahem).

If you haven’t yet set up your “Place” in the Wildr App and made it public, consider taking time to do it now. And maybe you’ll encourage others nearby who are dipping their toes in ecological landscaping. (You can download the app at joinwildr.com.)

Digging Deeper

• Still amending your soil? No scientific studies to date show any measurable benefit of soil amendment except in containerized plant production. Learn more at The Myth of Soil Amendments, Washington State University.

• ICYMI, you can watch recordings of the latest Less Lawn More Life webinars: building a natural pond with Robert Pavlis and making art and habitat from yard debris with Edwina von Gal.

• A newly study conducted in Uganda found catnip lotion as effective as DEET in repelling mosquitoes.

• I still find it difficult to capture the immersive experience of gardens in still photographs, but Jason Ingram’s advice helped.

• You can read more about my mulch obsession in Mulch Ado About Mulch.

Happy Independence Day!

And please join me, Robin Wall Kimmerer and her Plant Baby Plant nonprofit, and my daughter Zoe and the Wildr Places team in celebrating interdependence by sharing what it means to you at interdependence.everyday. For me, interdependence includes the web of life that Pete and I are nurturing—and are part of—in our yards. It also includes Zoe and my writing and teaching partnership to help others create similarly joyful communities of flora and fauna.

Meanwhile, I’ve been noodling about why Americans have not asserted our independence from an onerous British garden culture. There’s a vibrant gardening culture in the United Kingdom today that we’re largely missing out on because we’re still applying British plants and horticultural traditions in a hostile climate. You, dear readers, are the exceptions, leaders in the revolution, like the original patriots.

Lawn as civic duty

A familiar explanation for why we have lawn-dominated home landscapes starts with George Washington and other members of the early American elite trying to prove they weren’t complete rubes by maintaining vast, costly lawns similar to those they saw at aristocratic residences in France and England. A hundred years later, designer of the first planned community Frederick Law Olmsted and artist and popular author Frank J. Scott democratized lawns and imbued them with a uniquely American moral significance:

With our open-front lawns we declare our like-mindedness to our neighbors, and our distance from the English, who surround their hards with inhospitable brick wall.—Frank J. Scott in “The Art of Beautifying Suburban Home Grounds” (via National Wildlife Federation)

After World War II, this symbol of the suburban lifestyle became accessible to millions more, thanks to the G.I. Bill and the 40-hour workweek.

In this era, the lawn expanded beyond its role as a personal pleasure or status symbol; it became a measure of civic responsibility. The perfect, uninterrupted green of suburban landscapes came to represent the ideal community—one where each homeowner contributed to the collective aesthetic and well-being of the neighborhood. This uniformity, while visually pleasing, also exerted a subtle pressure on individuals to conform to certain standards of lawn care, lest they disrupt the visual harmony of their community.—National Wildlife Federation

More work for worse results

Peer pressure is certainly potent, but I don’t think lawn culture explains why Americans have so few flowers, shrubs, and trees in our yards. That origin story also starts with Brits. They are responsible for the exotic plants and ornamental horticulture traditions that make gardening in North American more toxic and difficult than in the U.K.

The United Kingdom has a mild, damp, and maritime climate with consistent but moderate rainfall, warm winters, and cool summers. This perfect weather encouraged a passion for gardening that, combined with a lack of native species and a mania for exploration, led Brits to scour the world for promising plants and to breed them for beauty and long-lasting blossoms, starting in the 17th century. Gardening became a national pastime in the Victorian era and remains immensely popular today.

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Early Americans with means adopted British ornamental plants and practices, motivated by nostalgia for Old England and a desire to differentiate their yards from their neighbors’ and the wilderness around them. And when American native flowers cropped up in their gardens, they dubbed them “weeds.” As a result, beautiful and ecologically valuable plants are called milkweed, ironweed, sneezeweed, butterfly weed, and Joe Pye weed. The penchant for foreign plants and disdain for local ones became so entrenched that American plants are now rare in American garden centers. Ironically, U.K. nurseries sell hundreds of cultivars of American natives unavailable here.

Gardening exotic plants in North America requires much more labor, knowledge, and inputs—amendments, fertilizer, irrigation, pesticides, etc.—for less satisfying results compared to in the U.K. The only city here with a climate like London’s is Seattle. The rest of our continent experiences differing combinations of extreme heat, freezing winters, hyper-humidity, and/or prolonged dry periods. Also, our soil tends to be either more acidic (in the East) or more alkaline (in the West). So, beloved English garden plants like delphiniums, bearded irises, and hybrid tea roses often succumb to heat stress, root rot, and mildew. Others like periwinkle and English ivy love some of our weather so much they take over, spreading into wild areas and displacing native vegetation and the fauna that depend on them. And some, like foxgloves, do both: they rot in the East and go wild in the West.

To make matters worse, our lots are much bigger than U.K. plots—about five times as big, on average—so it’s that much harder to create and maintain dense plantings. With smaller lots and an ideal climate, an individual or couple in the U.K. can create and maintain a beautiful ornamental garden on an average-sized lot just by puttering around on weekends. That’s not possible in the U.S. using exotic plants and traditional horticulture. It’s no wonder most Americans gave up on gardening and adopted a simple landscaping formula that’s easy to outsource: mostly mown lawn with a few tried-and-true foundation shrubs and specimen trees—many so easy to grow they’re often invasive (e.g., barberry, crape myrtle, golden rain tree, rose of Sharon, etc.). And those deep beds of mulch? A shortcut to achieve a neat look quickly with unskilled labor, nothing like the joyful explosion of dense planting that’s popular in England today.

The new beautiful—North American version

Ironically, I’ve learned a lot from contemporary Brits about how we can make our yards more joyful and biodiverse. I subscribe to dozens of their magazines, belong to their Garden Museum, travel to tour their gardens, etc. Sustainable gardening is already well entrenched there, promoted by the Royal Horticultural Society and required at its prestigious RHS Chelsea Flower Show. Densely planted ornamental gardens with little lawn and no visible mulch fill the pages of their premier magazine, Gardens Illustrated, and its gorgeous book “The New Beautiful.”

However, I ignore U.K. plant choices—unless they’re North American natives—as well as their seasonal advice. We need to adopt uniquely American methods for homeowners here to be able to create, maintain, and enjoy our much larger gardens in far less hospitable—and varied—climates. I feel proud to be one of the people who’s trying to figure this out—alongside Zoe and the Wildr Places team and hundreds of others. For certain, our native plants—adapted to specific climates, as well as supporting local insect populations—are central to the solution.

Fortunately, we can each declare independence from British gardening traditions—and interdependence with our local wildlife—in our own yards. You, dear readers, are reaping the rewards of having done so. I was so thrilled to see in our last poll that more than half of you average an hour or more a day in your yards. Bravo! (And thank so many of you for participating.) You are reaping the physical and mental health benefits—and pure joy—of American ecological landscaping with American plants.

—Heather

Why, How, Wow!

Why? Some of the dirty downside of lawns

Did you know that finding and promoting domestic uses for war chemicals was government policy? DDT was developed during World War II to kill malaria and typhus-carrying insects threatening our soldiers. Afterward, the Chemical Corps championed its domestic uses, including for lawns and gardens. Americans widely applied DDT in their yards until it was banned in 1972 thanks in large part to Rachel Carson’s book “Silent Spring,” which linked DDT to declining bird populations (including near extinction of the bald eagle) and even cancer in humans. Today, Americans continue to apply vast quantities of toxic chemicals to maintain their yards, as summarized by my friends at Prickly Ed’s Native Plant Emporium:

Americans use ten times more pesticides on lawns than farmers use on crops according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services. This amounts to 80 million pounds of pesticides spread across neighborhoods despite mounting research pointing to serious health concerns for both the humans and pets who spend time in those spaces.

Lawn chemicals also account for most documented wildlife poisonings each year. Birds are particularly vulnerable to this hazard since it is common for them to mistake pesticide granules for food. Indeed, an estimated seven million wild birds die each year due to the purely aesthetic use of common “Weed and Feed” step programs. These same products adversely impact essential pollinators like foraging native bees, kill countless beneficial insects, and are complicit in the stark decline of fireflies that once lit up night skies. Amphibians like … toads and spring peepers are also especially susceptible to harm from lawn care pesticides and fertilizers both through direct contact and run-off impacts.—pricklyeds.com

How: Prepping grass for planting (to be continued)

Dear Design Your Wild, How do you recommend prepping a grassy area to become a planting bed?—Jennifer Murphy

Great question! The answer depends on the size of the area, what you’re planning to plant (seed, plugs, or plants), the makeup of your grass (e.g., turf grass species, amount of invasives mixed in) and the thickness of its thatch, and your resources (time and money). I’m going to punt this week so I can create a framework. In the meantime, here’s what I’ve written about turf removal most recently.

Readers: Would you please help me by sharing in the comments your experiences preparing grassy areas for planting?

Wow! Before and after over the seasons

It’s garden tour season! Find a garden near you to tour through your local native plant groups or the Garden Conservancy Open Days. This gorgeous DIY lawn-to-natives transformation was on last year’s Native Plant Garden Tour of the Highland Park suburb of Chicago. (This year’s tour is July 11 and you can still register here.)

Here’s what owners Fritz and James say about their experience:

We moved to Highland Park in 2020 and knew from the start we wanted to be part of the growing movement to replace traditional lawns with landscapes that are more vibrant, diverse, and environmentally sustainable. As an avid birder since my college days, I saw our new parcel of green as a unique opportunity to create a native garden that would be as beautiful as it was beneficial—drawing in not only birds, but also a wide array of pollinators and other wildlife. …

One of the great joys of native gardening is that it’s an ongoing learning experience. Each year brings new insights—about which plants thrive in our specific conditions, which combinations create the most appealing look, and which species turn out to be more aggressive than expected. We’ve come to see our garden as a living laboratory, where we continually refine and adapt. That process of discovery makes the work deeply rewarding and keeps us engaged season after season.—Go Green HP

Digging Deeper

• Wondering about how we handled the skunk in our yard? We didn’t. It left on its own after having babies under our shed. Whew! We were worried that our dog Sukey would get sprayed. Meantime, I read Humane Gardener Nancy Lawson’s Skunks Are Better Than Pesticides.

• In case you missed it, here’s a gift link to the New York Times’s article, You Love Your Native Garden But Will Buyers Love It Too? Patios and seating are the landscaping upgrades that add the most home value, according to Real Simple. Personally, I don’t think you can ever have enough chairs—anywhere—but in the recent heat wave I’m most appreciative of our outdoor shower; here’s how to design one, per Martha Stewart.

• Becoming an expert birder can reshape your brain and might protect it from aging, according to new research; learn more at Smithsonian.

• Want to do a biodiversity audit? Here’s how from Perfect Earth Project.

• Finally, what’s behind this week’s poll? I read Researchers Accidentally Discover That Humans Prefer to Turn Counterclockwise. But They Still Have No Idea Why and wonder whether I should advise readers to design their yard circuits with that in mind.

Happy summer! While I’m traveling this week, I’m resharing this fan favorite guide to enjoying your yard.

How much time do you spend in your yard? I’m truly curious, so please answer my poll below. (Respondents get to see how others answer, too.)

The average American spends only 7.6 percent of their time outside—slightly more than the 5.5 percent of time we spend in enclosed vehicles. Roughly half this time—an hour a day—is spent in their or another’s yard. The rest of the time we’re indoors in enclosed buildings.

This data from the National Human Activity Pattern Survey (NHAPS) is 25 years old. But do you really think people spend more time outside now than in the late 1990s? 

Sure, the pandemic got more people gardening and hiking, but it also tripled the number of us working from home. Cutting out commuting dramatically decreases the amount of time we spend outside. In fact, a quarter of the time people spent outside in the 1990s was spent near a vehicle, presumably going to and from their car or other transportation.

And it’s not just Americans who spend the vast majority of our time indoors. An activity pattern study of 12 countries concluded,

The finding that emerges is that we are basically an indoor species. . . . In a modern society, total time outdoors is the most insignificant part of the day, often so small that it barely shows up in the total. — W.R. Ott, quoted in Journal of Exposure Analysis and Environmental Epidemiology

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Before you start feeling superior—as I did when I read these stats—recognize that 7.6 percent amounts to almost two hours per day (55 hours a month). I’m not sure I beat that average; how about you?

And that’s serious, because being outdoors is so good for us. To start with, as we learned during the pandemic, outdoor air quality is generally much better than indoor air.

Americans, on average, spend approximately 90 percent of their time indoors, where the concentrations of some pollutants are often 2 to 5 times higher than typical outdoor concentrations.—EPA

Outdoor time is especially valuable if it’s in green spaces, as opposed to parking lots. In fact, a recent study found that living near green space adds 2.5 years to your life, on average. So here are my suggestions for activities to do regularly to increase the time you spend in your yard:

1. Do some yard work.

I was shocked to learn that the average American spends about an hour a day on yard upkeep during the warmer months. But nothing wrong with that! In addition to getting you outside into restorative green space, yard work is good exercise.

So if you’re outsourcing to a mow and blow crew, maybe consider taking on some work yourself. It’ll be better for you and better for the environment. You can put some of the money you save into a battery-operated mower and stop using fertilizer, herbicides, and insecticides. And maybe you’ll love it.

But ecological yard maintenance can be less time consuming than the average (see below), so try these other enjoyable ways to use your yard:

2. Make a slow circuit, regularly.

If you live in a free-standing house, make a habit of doing the circuit of your yard. Pick a time and do it daily. Good times include early morning or after dinner when it’s cooler or during the day as a break from remote work. To slow yourself down, take a beverage—coffee, ice water, wine—and closely observe changes since the day before. 

As I’ve written before, I do this circuit first thing in the morning to see what’s newly blooming. I use the Picture This app to identify unknown plants and track new blooms to compare year-over-year in this simple journal. I also take work breaks—as I’m going to do right now. . . .

3. Identify birds by their sounds.

Whether you have a small, urban yard or a large, country estate, you can spend time identifying nearby birds by their sounds using the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Merlin app. The best times are morning and evening, because birds also prefer cooler air. Pete regularly identifies the birds he hears when he walks Sukey in the morning, mentally comparing the number and types day to day. 

4. Make every day a picnic.

It seems obvious, but sometimes we need reminders, so I’m making a mental note for myself to have one meal each day outside when weather permits. That might be morning coffee at a small table in a remote corner. Or a family barbecue and dinner each night. I had friends who cooked every meal outside for a year while they renovated their kitchen. And why not? 

5. Take your work or a book outside.

As long as it’s not TOO hot, move your work outside. We just got an extender for our Wi-Fi to make it easier. Or just take a break with a book on a lounge. I’m making this a regular late afternoon activity.

6. Imagine your next project.

I spend an inordinate amount of time wandering around the yard thinking about the next stage, then measuring and placing flags to mark a possible design. Then I ponder. Etc. If you’re a planner like me, this is fun.

7. Enjoy the view from inside.

This isn’t going to increase the amount of time you spend outside, but maximizing ways to look at your garden from inside will certainly add to your joy—especially if you live where the summer heat outside is unbearable. I’ve positioned my desk perpendicular to the windows so I can see our new hedge as I work. (Look there’s a clouded sulfur butterfly!) We turned our porch into the dining room. And our indoor seating is arranged to see the yard and the plants outside are arranged to be viewed from inside. Pete spotted a hummingbird from the living room window just this morning.

8. Just lie down in the grass and look at the sky.

Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer's day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.—John Lubbock

Have fun!

—Heather

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Why, How, Wow!

Why?

There’s lots of research that proves being outside in nature is good for our mental and physical health. For example, spending time in a diverse natural environment, as opposed to a monoculture lawn, increases the diversity of your microbiome.

And recent studies show impressive benefits from yard work. For older women, only yard work rivals weight training for building bone density.

Findings from the present study indicate that jogging, swimming and calisthenics were weak predictors for high bone density values. Bicycling, aerobics, walking and dancing were moderate predictors for positive bone density. Yard work and weight training were strong and independent predictors for positive bone density.—Journal of Women & Aging

How

Frankly, I am not one of the almost half of Americans who apparently love mowing and/or gardening—and I apparently spend much less time doing yard work than most.

The average American reported that during the warmer months, they will spend six hours every month just mowing the lawn. On top of that, they spend three hours edging the yard per month, four hours pulling weeds, four more hours tending to the garden, three hours laying mulch, four hours watering the lawn, and eight hours doing additional miscellaneous tasks— equaling 32 hours in total.—New York Post

Pete and I average about 13 hours each per month, mostly mowing (Pete) and cutting invasives (Heather). We don’t edge, lay mulch, or water the lawn. That’s about two hours per week—not counting all the time I spend wandering around imagining and measuring.

Wow!

Not all ecological landscapes look like prairies. Doesn’t this yard, designed to evoke “a weathered driftwood aesthetic,” make you want to spend time outside?

As part of the dunescape restoration, approximately 6,700 cubic yards of sand was utilized to elevate the dune by ten feet on average, and more than 25,000 plugs of American beachgrass (Ammophila breviligulata) were planted to stabilize the dune. Additionally, native shrub plantings including bayberry, beach plum and beach heather further complement the dunescape, providing a more diverse ecological environment.—The Cultural Landscape Foundation

Digging Deeper

• Want to watch birds from your windows? Plant one of the berry bushes native to your region in this list from Birds and Blooms.

• Curious about nature and your microbiome? Learn more in Your Gut and Your Garden.

• Ready to adopt an ecological approach to weeding? Read The Latest on Weeds.

Readers Respond

Dear Design Your Wild, How and where do you locate destinations and focal points?—Workshop participant

Intentionally! As pioneering user experience designer Jared Spool famously said,

Design is the rendering of intent. At the core of design is intention.—Jared Spool

Your intentions for your destinations—let’s hold off on focal points for a moment—are how you want them to function, to make you feel, and to look from the house and elsewhere in the yard.

What’s going to feel right

One way to make destinations that feel good is to leave plenty of room for plants around them. You can see how the destinations (as well as paths) in garden designer Darcy Daniels’ 5,000-square-foot Portland yard, illustrated above, are surrounded by plants, not turf, and not pushed against the house or fence. (Daniels shares the joy of gardening in the Pacific Northwest on her eGardenGo website and YouTube channel.)

Siting destinations in relation to the house also makes them feel right, appealing to our innate senses of proportion and symmetry. One tool to help establish a relationship to the house is regulating lines—imaginary lines extending into the yard from the walls and main doors of your house. You DON’T want to site destinations in relation to your fence or property line; instead, “blur” your property line with vines, shrubs and trees so it looks as if the trees in neighboring yards are part of your vast estate.

Establishing intentions

Here are what I imagine garden designer Darcy Daniels’ intentions might have been for the numbered areas in her yard:

1. “I want a cosy seating area, just visible from the house and studio, that will pull us into the most remote corner of the yard.” The chairs face the house in a welcoming posture. Note that this seating area is centered over the imaginary line that extends back from the left side of the house.

2. “I want a comfy gathering area nestled against the studio wall that’s visible and easily accessible from the back door.”

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3. “Between the studio and the kitchen door, I’d like a dining table that seats six.” The table is centered in a dining area that extends from the right side of the back stoop to the right side of the house.

4. “I’d like a ‘social front yard’ where I can see neighbors and welcome them to join me.” This seating is centered between the sides of the front extension. The chairs face the street to welcome friends into the yard, angled and with semi-transparent backs so they also look attractive from the large front window.

These seating areas are destinations and their furnishings are also focal points—i.e., visual elements that attract your attention so you literally focus on them. I’m sure seeing their attractive and welcoming comfort pulls Daniels and her friends out of the house and down the various paths that connect these destinations and encircle the house.

“The best decisions I’ve made have been prioritizing places for people,” she says. The generous spaces serve as welcoming focal points throughout the garden.—Better Homes & Gardens Perennial Gardening

Besides signaling comfort and improving the view, focal points can create moments of surprise or pause and distract from something you’d rather not see.

5. “And I’d like to give visitors a moment of pause before they mount the steps to our house.” Solution? A sculptural small tree beside the path.

It’s not so easy fitting all your intentions into a harmonious whole, but once you have a rough idea, you can test it on the ground: Take a chair into the yard, place landscape flags—or branches—around your destination, test out your game lawn, have a friend stand in for a focal point tree, etc. And check the views from every conceivable direction—again and again. Eventually, you’ll start to feel where the right place is for each destination. And if you later change your mind, you can always move plants or mow a seating area into your meadow.

Dear Design Your Wild, When is it best to leave a non-native vs. remove it? I have a large yard (.85 of an acre) and have been adding native shrubs and trees for several years. However, one of the only two big trees in my yard is a very large, 18-year-old, non-native sawtooth oak. Would it be better to remove this tree and plant a native oak in its place or leave it to preserve the habitat and look of the backyard? We enjoy the shade and the birds and squirrels use the tree. A new native oak would take years to reach the same size.—Amy, Johnson City, Tennessee

I’m sorry to have to tell you, but your saw tooth oak is invasive, not just non-native.

With respect to native vs. non-native, Zoe and I generally use the “two thirds for the birds” guideline, based on research on the amount of native vegetation needed to support nesting birds. That means up to one third of an ecologically healthy yard’s biomass can be non-native turf, fruits and vegetables, and beloved flowers, shrubs, and trees. In fact, some studies have found gardens with a wide variety of natives and non-natives support even more insect biodiversity than all-native gardens (learn more here).

Unfortunately, saw tooth oak (Quercus acutissima) has been invading forests in the eastern United States, displacing more ecologically valuable native trees. Arborist Basil Camu, who argues persuasively against removing trees under most circumstances, says simply, “Invasive trees damage local ecosystems. They should be removed and replaced with native species.” [I recommend anyone thinking of removing a tree read Chapter 11 of Camu’s book, “From Wasteland to Wonderland” (ebook available free).]

Dead wood is habitat.

I wouldn’t worry about the temporary loss of bird and squirrel habitat. In fact, if you leave some of the dead oak as a snag or as a log wall, you’ll create habitat for thousands of other species that have fewer alternatives. The National Wildlife Federation recommends keeping three snags per acre and most urban and suburban neighborhoods have far fewer.

However, your and your family’s enjoyment of the oak’s shade and beauty is important, as are other any needs competing for the funds to kill or cut down the saw oak and buy a new tree. So it’s reasonable to consider the likelihood of your saw tooth oak (or its progeny) displacing native plants in natural areas. Oaks don’t spread rapidly by root like tree of heaven or airborne samaras like Norway maples. Is your tree close enough to wild areas for jays and squirrels to plant acorns there?

Like most oaks, this species is likely spread by squirrels and blue jays that transport and cache acorns by burying them in the ground, but don’t recover a substantial number that grow into new trees.—Louisiana Native Plant Society

If you do decide to replace your saw tooth oak, Evergreen of Johnson City carries a wide selection of locally native oaks, including fast-growing willow oak (Quercus phellos). Lindsey in their shrub and tree area enthuses about this beautiful, easy-care tree. A forty-gallon willow oak is about ten feet tall and can be expected to grow two to three feet a year after it recovers from transplant shock. For fastest growth, follow these watering guidelines.

—Heather

Hi, it’s Zoe here, jumping in with an update: The free Wildr Places app now shows you common, high-pressure invasive plants in your area. Open the app and navigate to your Place, then scroll down to the new invasives section.

Download Wildr Places

Why, How, Wow!

Why? Making an outdoor place people love

I always come back to Doug Kent’s 10 research-based attributes of a restorative landscape when I’m ideating destinations and focal points and where to site them. You can incorporate all 10 into even the smallest yard, if you’re creative. Looking for ideas? Check out our linked Pinterest boards.

Douglas Kent’s 10 design attributes for a restorative landscape

1. Security—Encapsulate while revealing immediate surroundings

2. Accessibility—Stable ways to move through the landscape

3. Choices—Various ways to interact with the space

4. Comfort—Opportunities for rest, if not relaxation

5. Meditation—Places that make you pause and think differently (This is where focal points come in!)

6. Sun/shade—Thermal comfort by offering options

7. Stimulation—All senses: Feel, sight, hearing, smell, taste

8. Ambient noise—Rhythmic natural noises (chirping, water falling, leaves rustling)

9. Water—Audible and within reach

10. Views—From inside the house extend benefits, draw people outside

How: Putting wood (and Pete) to work

I am so lucky to have married an excellent carpenter! Pete, who also serves as our cartoon editor, has built an arbor, numerous focal points and, most recently, a stunning walkway that really makes our Gainesville backyard. I help where I can, but my impatience and carelessness make me more of a liability than an asset around the workbench.

That doesn’t stop me from coming up with new ideas to put Pete’s skills to work, especially since I found out even pressure treated wood is carbon positive. Wood is a also durable, cost-effective, and environmentally friendly. And it weathers to a grey that contrasts beautifully with greenery.

If you’re a carpenter or loved by one, you’ll find numerous plans and instruction videos online. For inspiration, check out these Pinterest boards, as well as our more general ones linked above:

• Arbor and trellis designs

• Fence ideas

• Great garden sheds

• Outdoor furniture and planters

• Porch swings

Wow! Wood destinations and focal points

El-shaped deck seating (and classic steamer chairs)

Stepped walkway to deck

Outdoor kitchen-cum-hot-tub, plus arbor and deck

Digging Deeper

• Stimulating all the senses, including taste, is a top 10 attribute of a restorative landscape, according to research. But vegetables are so much work! And they look ugly so much of the year! So I incorporate taste with fruiting shrubs and trees or pots of herbs and participate in sustainable farming via our fab Rhode Island CSA, Long Lane Farm. If you’re dead set on growing vegetables, I recommend making your veggie garden a destination (perhaps with a deer fence). For examples of beautifully designed kitchen gardens around the world, check out the scrumptious book, The Kitchen Garden.

• The world is evidently going crazy for fireflies just as they are going extinct. According to The Wall Street Journal, this year’s parking lottery for the Great Smoky Mountain viewing period attracted more than 45,000 applications for 906 spaces. Learn from the Xerces Society how to make sure fireflies survive and see my article on limiting artificial light at night, including a DIY wood path light.

• I’ve just started Ken Druse’s course on vegetative propagation of woody plants and am in love with layering. So fast! So easy! Here’s a video on how to ground layer shrubs.

• And a video for those who wanted more info on micro forests.

Dear Design Your Wild, Have you done any articles on designing a foundation garden? I have a really long house with a large area to landscape. Do you design it like a garden room? Or do you frame the house with plants?—Jennifer

You caught me! I have been avoiding the topic of foundation planting because I’m not a fan of traditional foundation shrubs. In fact, the first thing I did when we closed on our homes in Florida and Rhode Island is rip out the overgrown shrubs that were blocking the windows and darkening the living rooms. Because, as I’ve written before, the view from inside is My No. 1 Design Priority. (By “rip out,” by the way, I actually mean cut to the ground; there’s generally no reason to remove stumps.)

Don’t sit your house on a shrubbery pedestal

After the view from inside, your most frequent views of your yard are probably what you see when you leave or arrive at your home. Your house, including the foundation, is part of this experience, but it’s not an artwork to frame or to put on a shrubbery pedestal, builders’ reductive approach to landscaping for “curb appeal.” I don’t like that because it puts the emphasis on how others see your house, instead of on how you and your loved ones enjoy the experience; however, it’s unwise to totally ignore curb appeal, because it adds seven percent to home value, according to research. Just do it your way.

When Zoe first toured me around her home, I asked what she planned to do about the trash cans along the walk to her back door. She teases me about my judgy-ness, but these things matter! So adopt my judgy mindset and retrace the path you most frequently take when you’re returning home, by car or foot. What do you see as you approach your home? As you walk along the path to your door? When you reach the entry? Take pictures. Photographs highlight unsightly details to which familiarity has blinded us. What do you notice in the pictures that you didn’t see before? Then make a plan to improve the experience. (For ideas, watch Zoe and my design workshop Turn that Patch into a Plan and read Why You Need a Chair (or Two) in Your Front Yard).

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Everything you add between your perspective (e.g., from the street) and the house—a tapestry hedge for privacy, open areas with seating, a curving path to stroll around the house, trees and shrubs to add pause, dense plantings anywhere—will distract from the span of your house. If you think a tall shrub or two close to the house between windows will improve your experience, on top of everything else, then plant them, too.

In addition, I recommend you—and everyone—make your entry gorgeous, as I describe in “How” below. It’ll bring you joy.

Dear Design Your Wild, How far from a house should a shrub be? Can you recommend re: planting now for how we envision the garden years from now? Many of us will be planting wee plants, shrubs, or trees, but the design is made with full-grown plants in mind.—Workshop participant

If you’ve read this far, you know I’m not a fan of foundation shrubs. You might consider planting forbs closer to the house, and using shrubs for privacy and for adding pause and surprise to your daily stroll. (Or planting nothing against the house, where wildfire risk is high.) But that’s not what you asked…

Plant foundation shrubs half their mature spread (diameter) plus 18 inches from the house, which will leave space to access the house for repairs. If you can’t find the shrub’s mature spread, assume it’s equal to its mature height. And, while we’re on the subject of height, never plant a shrub that will eventually block a window. If you’re set on a particular species, plant a dwarf cultivar, rather than commit yourself (or some future owner) to perpetual pruning.

As for imagining how shrubs and trees will fill in over time, read my article What If It’s Too Tall? for tree size and growth charts and how to visualize sizes relative to your body and your house.

Happy planting!

—Heather

P.S. Can you identify one element common to all the front gardens that illustrate this newsletter? (Answer at bottom)

Why, How, Wow!

Why? For the birds

You know this, right? Bird populations are plummeting, as are the caterpillar populations they need to breed. A big reason I plant natives and write this newsletter is to help turn around this disturbing trend. (For a refresher, see The Big “Why.”)

That’s why Zoe and I got so excited about the graph below from Cornell eBirds Garden for Birds. It’s more proof that our work makes a difference! A homeowner tracked the bird species he observed in his small Florida yard before and after replacing turf with mostly native plants. Within five years, he was seeing more than four times as many bird species.

Participation in the eBirds Garden for Birds project is by invitation—which Cornell is kindly extending to you, dear readers. Use the invitation link below to sign up for (or into) an eBird account and follow instructions. (Unfortunately, Merlin observations don’t yet count.)

Join Cornell eBird Garden for Birds

And, to get your yard’s health score and jumpstart your yard’s transformation, join the 12-week Less Lawn, More Life challenge.

How: Attend to inexpensive details for big impact

I want everything I see as I walk from the curb or driveway into my home to look (and smell) beautiful. Your front door—and back door, if you use it regularly—is a focal point. In my opinion, though perhaps not that of my neighbors, a refined and sumptuous entryway is the most important “cue to care,” communicating the intentionality of the wild plantings around it. That means attending to numerous small details, most of them inexpensive fixes, fortunately. Here’s a checklist based on what Pete and I did to transform our Rhode Island entryway. (Links are to sources.)

1. Cut down or cut back too-tall shrubs.

2. Remove extraneous or unattractive details (e.g., storm door, metal handrail, too-small, randomly-placed house numbers).

3. Pressure wash the siding.

4. Buy an attractive, natural-fiber door mat (e.g., this animal-print coir door mat).

5. Paint the front door a fabulous color. Repaint the trim. (See this year’s hot front door colors, per House Beautiful.)

6. Add details consistent with the house style (e.g., original wood shutters and unlacquered brass kickplate, five-inch house numbers, and hand cast door knocker). I often source hand-crafted hardware from Etsy.

7. Introduce a large planter or two or a trio in different sizes (minimum 18 inches deep).

8. Consider vintage cast stone sculpture.

9. Polish the door handle.

10. We didn’t have room, but place a bench or a chair or two if you do.

Wow! Stunning native entry garden

Landscape architect Ed Hollander created a gorgeous native entry garden at this Hamptons home, incorporating numerous shrubs into the plantings on both sides of the path; he did not push all the shrubs up against the house in a traditional foundation planting. I only wish it had a bench to add that sense of comfort. The other outdoor rooms in this large yard include a pool, pickleball court, organic vegetable garden, a dining pavilion, and a screened-in tea house nestled by the water.

By converting lawn areas to pollinator meadows and finessing new connections with bursts of native and climate-appropriate trees, flowers and grasses, “We were able to preserve the best of what was there while bringing it into tune, and to restore the landscape to what it might have been,” Hollander says.—Luxe

Although many of us can’t afford such lavish destinations, most can create an equally beautiful entry garden, given enough time.

Digging deeper

• Take your gloves off! If you don’t know why, read the New York Times’ recent article about the health benefits of getting our hands dirty. [gift link] Or just envisage your body as a symbiotic assemblage of trillions of microbes—a concept dubbed “holobiont”—and reap the benefits of feeling closer to nature, according to Australian research.

• Turn a patch of grass into an outdoor room with an adult lawn game from L.L. Bean. Or make a kids’ play area with some mud and a hose, as I describe in Kids Will Love Nature If You Do These 10 Things.

• This year’s RHS Chelsea Flower Show, the world’s most prestigious horticultural event, once again demonstrates that English garden pros are way ahead of Americans with respect to adopting relaxed planting, low-carbon inputs, and practices that encourage biodiversity. Check out Alexandra Campbell’s video summary, The Best RHS Chelsea 2026 Ideas—That Actually Work at Home. (9 minutes)

• Interested in contributing beyond your lot line? Search for volunteer opportunities near you with the National Parks Service and Fish & Wildlife Service here.

Answer: All the entry gardens have BALLS!

By that I mean, they have evergreen globes. Their year-round structure and elegance adds a “je ne sais quoi” to formal and naturalistic gardens alike. Skip the box (so blighted, so last century) and go for a cultivar of something native to you, bred to keep its size and spherical shape to minimize pruning. The ones in my entry planters are inkberry holly (Ilex glabra) ‘Gembox.’ I love the idea of grouping different size cultivars of one species—like ‘Gembox’ and ‘Shamrock’—in what our friend Martine dubbed a “shrub cabal.”

The new book, Plant This, Not That, recommends these box alternatives. Ask your native plant nursery to recommend a dense, rounded cultivar.

• Inkberry holly (Ilex glabra, get at least one male for fruiting): AL, AR, CT, DE, FL, GA, LA, MA, MD, ME, MS, NC, NH, NJ, NY, OH, PA, RI, SC, TX, VA

• Oregon boxwood (Paxistima myrsinites): AZ, CA, CO, ID, MT, NM, OR, UT, WA, WY

Great options with limited ranges: Yaupon holly (Ilex vomitoria) in the Southeast and Walter’s viburnum (Viburnum obovatum) in Florida.

See my article for online sources of conifer globe cultivars. Keep in mind that dwarf conifers can be v-e-r-y slow growing.

Dear Design Your Wild, I am intrigued by the microforest idea. Can you tell us more? Also, how to improve existing woodlands?—Tracy

Anyone can create a microforest—or pocket forest—in as small as a 10-by-10-foot area. Based on the work of Japanese ecologist Akira Miyawaki in the 1970s, microforests are a way to rapidly reclaim industrial or urban land. Miyawaki’s method involves deep tilling, numerous prescribed amendments, and a wide variety of native shrubs and trees planted densely.

Bram Gunther, Wildr’s vice president of science and former head of forestry for the City of New York, told me the key to rapid growth is dense planting, not tilling or amendments. Whereas traditional forestry practices recommend 100 to 150 trees per acre, microforests are orders of magnitude denser: one woody plant for every two square feet—or up to 22,000 per acre.

Pocket forests: 10-by-10 building blocks

Gunther and Dave Baker, co-founder of Plan it Wild, a Westchester landscaping company, have experimented with till, no till, planting directly into sod, and various plant sizes under five gallons. “The trick is the shrub and groundcover layer,” says Baker. If it’s planted densely, “everything else falls in line. It’s also a natural deer deterrent, because deer tend not to be able to browse easily in such dense planting.” Until this layer establishes, they install temporary protective fencing.

Plan it Wild has installed microforests as small as 275 square feet, repeating 10-by-10-foot building blocks and always incorporating a path for exploration. Here’s a sample formula for a 10-by-10 area:

• Two canopy trees (e.g., white oak, sugar maple, tulip poplar)

• 16 understory trees

• 32 shrubs

• Groundcover forbs around the edge to keep out invasives

Improving existing woodlands

Creating a path is also a first step to improving an existing woodland—after you’ve improved any woodland edge visible from your existing paths and destinations. Then tackle the visible areas along the path one section at a time, removing invasives and encouraging or planting native perennials and shrubs. (For how to attack invasives, see The Latest on Weeds and, for large forested areas, Shade Solutions for Invasives.)

You can create a florific early spring wonderland with wildflower species that take advantage of sunshine before deciduous trees leaf out, as well as flowering understory trees and shrubs. Many woodland wildflowers are ephemerals that disappear in the heat of the summer, so plant green groundcovers with interesting leaves and woodland asters that grow slowly to bloom in fall. For ideas, see Vibrant Native Plants for Shade and, if you’re in the eastern half of the continent, Edge of the Woods Nursery’s article on ephemerals.

Whether you’re planting a new forest or into an existing one, plant just before your rainiest season (see weatherspark.com) and follow these watering guidelines.

Dear Design Your Wild, I’m 900 feet from Lake Erie (but up a 50-foot bluff). The deer don’t need me to have a pond, but how important is it for other wildlife? Or the pollinators I’m feeding with native plants?

The pollinators you’re currently feeding are already getting water somewhere. Native bees forage over a smaller distance than butterflies and non-native honeybees, but they still cover a few hundred yards. A pond will attract more of these bees and butterflies, because they’ll come to your yard for water, as well as food.

A pond will also attract numerous additional species that need water to reproduce—arthropods like dragonflies, damselflies, fishing spiders, caddisflies, water boatmen, backswimmers, whirligig beetles, and water striders, and potentially amphibians like frogs and toads. It will also provide habitat for myriad bacteria, fungi, algae, rotifers, and hydra that spend their entire lives in water. So, even with a Great Lake close by, adding a pond will make your yard more biodiverse.

The National Wildlife Federation does not require you have a pond to become a Certified Wildlife Habitat, an achievable guideline for responsible land stewardship. They only require a source of fresh water, which can be as small as a dish of water. Only you know which option is best for you and your household. Whatever you choose, pat yourself on the back for creating wildlife habitat.

Dear Design Your Wild, I have a 20-by-12-foot native garden in front of my house and am considering adding a pond. However, my garden ends at the street, with a wooded area on the other side of the road. It’s not a super busy street, but... Is it irresponsible to create a “destination” water feature that could imperil the wildlife coming from the woods? The deer and foxes are pretty savvy, but I fear for things like frogs.—Kristen

An ecological trap? Like a bird feeder patrolled by an outdoor cat? Or milkweeds planted in the middle of a busy highway? Something to think about…

I applaud you for attending to amphibians! According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), two out of five amphibian species globally are threatened with extinction, making them the most threatened vertebrate group. And they often die crossing the road to find breeding pools after wintering among damp leaves and decaying wood in forests.

The timing means that many of these small critters migrate at exactly the same time. On the right damp April night, hundreds of thousands may be on the move. Unfortunately, migration usually means crossing roads, and each spring scores of amphibians are crushed by traffic as they laboriously make their way across. A smaller number are hit as the adults make their way back from the breeding pools, and when the young leave the pools on their way to adult habitats. In certain areas, road mortality can be incredibly high.—JStor Daily

There is insufficient research on frog dispersal and homing to know for sure, but if the amphibians in your area find your pond and breed in it, they probably need the additional breeding habitat. And you’ll be attracting and supporting a host of other small and microscopic organisms. So I say, go for it.

Good day, wild ladies :) I’m on a slight hill and my house looks down on my neighbor’s junk and deteriorating outbuildings. We’ve tried to chat about a clean up; he just doesn’t get it. I’d like to plant trees, but our properties are separated by septic beds. I’m even OK forfeiting some of my property to install something closer to my house. Suggestions?—Janice, Val-des-monts, Quebec

It’s true you should not plant shrubs or trees on the septic beds, but you can plant them nearby. The rule of thumb is to locate woody plants at least their mature height away from the edge of a septic field. And don’t plant species with deep, water-seeking roots like willows, ashes, beeches, birches, elms, maples, sweetgum, or tulip trees. Based on the sketch you sent, you can safely plant 10-foot shrubs along your lot line and 30-foot trees halfway between the two septic beds.

My suggestion is to create a microforest. You won’t be forfeiting your property, you’ll be gaining a gorgeous woodland. Your view will go from awful to alluring—in fact, you’ll probably want to create a path to stroll along it—while providing vital cover and food for birds. (See Here’s How to Welcome Baby Birds to Your Yard.)

Design a planting pattern using the above formula without the canopy trees, with shrubs toward your neighbor’s house and a mix of trees and shrubs toward yours. And buy as many plants as you can afford. When you pack them in, they compete for sunlight and grow faster.

Fortunately, there’s an online seller of native shrub and tree plugs for $7.25 to $9 each. (They will only ship within Ontario, so you’ll have to get help from a friend in nearby Ottawa. Ecosystems don’t honor political borders.) Species in septic-safe genera, with links to their website, include:

• Serviceberry, 35’, but usually smaller (Amalanchier laevis)

• Sweet crab apple, 30’ (Malus coronaria)

• Redbud, 30’ (Cercis canadensis)

• Wild plum, 25’ (Prunus americana)

• Flowering dogwood, 20’(Cornus florida)

• Dwarf chinkapin oak, 15’ (Quercus prinoides)

• Winterberry holly, 10’ (Ilex verticillata)

• Northern bayberry, 10’ (Morella pensylvanica)

• Highbush blueberry, 8’ (Vaccinium corymbosum)

Worried your microforest will take too long to grow in? It should be impressive in three years. In the meantime, your temporary fencing will somewhat obscure your neighbor’s junk and create a distracting eyesore on your side of the lot line:)

—Heather

P.S. There’s still time to join Zoe’s Less Lawn More Life challenge, a series of 12-weekly emails on creating a healthier yard, starting with a test of your yard’s health, the Wildr Score.

Join the free challenge

Wow: Edgy Woodland in the City

Landscape designer Stefano Marinaz created this woodland garden with a container pond in his client’s 30 by 30-foot turf yard. Explains Marinaz,

“She wanted her daughters to enjoy the space, but during our conversation I was encouraged to hear that the garden itself could be the playground. If the garden is an exploratory space for kids to play in, they don’t necessarily need to have playground equipment.”—The English Garden (Spring 2026)

And so work began on a complete transformation, turning that square of plain grass into an atmospheric and richly planted space. An area for dining was a priority, but so too was creating a beautiful view the clients could enjoy from inside the house. “It’s cold and rainy for six months of the year in England, so you’re mostly going to see the garden from inside,” says Stefano, wryly. “That’s why the furniture is pushed to the furthest point of the garden, and it’s filtered by meandering paths that make the journey through the garden longer than a straight line from A to B. When you’re inside you can see the picture. You have planting beds that are right there as you open the door.”—The English Garden (Spring 2026)

To ensure the view is predominantly green year-round, Marinaz included evergreen trees, shrubs and grasses. (You can search for evergreens native to your state using the combination search at wildflower.org/plants.)

In this roughly 1,000 square foot space, Marinaz included nine trees—three each of three tree species—to provide year-round interest: pines for winter greenery, a Prunus for spring flowers, and a species with yellow leaves for fall. Small North American trees that turn yellow in fall include American witch hazel, eastern redbud, sassafras, and flowering dogwood.

“The garden is in full sun but young children need a bit of shade to be able to enjoy the garden, and rather than putting in the usual parasols and umbrellas, we used the power of nature instead. The canopy of the trees filters the light so the garden still has bright shade.”—The English Garden (Spring 2026)

Some may balk at the idea of planting nine trees in a small garden like this, but Stefano has no regrets: “I always say we don’t have enough trees in our gardens. People always ask: ‘What if they grow too big?’ But first, you choose the right trees to put in and second, if they do grow too big, you can always cut them down. If a tree becomes an issue in 25 years’ time, you’ll have enjoyed benefits from it, nature will have benefited from it, then you cut it down and start again. Where is the issue? Don’t be afraid of trees!”—The English Garden (Spring 2026)

See more images at stefanomarinaz.com.

Digging Deeper

• The Wildr Places app Zoe is helping to develop is now in beta. “Zoe’s Wonderland” and my “Rhody Retreat” are featured gardens and I’m having a blast acting as an expert tester. Download the app here or learn more about it in Margaret Roach’s Wildr: a new free app to guide us on our ecological journey.

• Need new tools? My exact go-tos are a needle fruit pruner, a bypass pruner, and a Hori/soil knife, which I carry together in Joe Gardener’s Ultimate Gardening Sheath. The only shovel I manage to push through the soil is this Root Slayer.

• I like these suggestions from Home & Gardens’ on How to Give Your New Backyard ‘Instant History.’

• It’s garden tour time! Local botanic gardens, Garden Conservancy Open Days, and the New York Times’ recent article on nine unforgettable gardens [gift link] are great sources of inspiration. If you’re going to be in Dallas, don’t miss the garden at the George W. Bush Presidential Center (or gawk at it here).

Many years ago this site would have been a breathtaking Texas prairie. Today the park is planted once again with a native habitat for birds, butterflies and other wildlife. Visitors can experience this site’s beautiful natural environment in the center of Dallas.—Former First Lady Laura Bush

Dear Design Your Wild, I didn’t really understand the golden ratio. Were you talking about plant bed shapes?—Design workshop participant

Nope. We recommend using the golden ratio—or a rough approximation—for sizing oval and rectangular garden “rooms,” not beds. Making destinations like your patio or play lawn or fenced edibles garden regular shapes signals to your brain “you have arrived.” Plant beds around these garden rooms are often irregularly shaped.

Using the golden ratio, the length of the long side of a rectangle is 1.618 times the length of the short side. We use this very loosely, so Zoe’s patio is a 20 by 30-foot oval (1.5 times), for example. The concept keeps us from making uncomfortable, bowling-alley-like spaces. (See “Why?” below for examples of the golden ratio in nature.)

Dear Design Your Wild, How do I make my kids’ full size soccer goal fit into our third-acre yard? And all the other sporty equipment they love?—Kate, Kansas

Your average size lot has space for MANY garden rooms—including a soccer goal and practice area. Think about it: The average house, garage, and driveway take up less than 4,000 square feet. That leaves an enormous 11,000 square feet of outdoor living space.

Let’s assume you want to participate fully in Doug Tallamy’s Homegrown National Park challenge and replace at least half your lawn with native plants. If your outdoor space is currently mostly lawn, that’s 5,500 square feet of layered native plantings and an equal amount of open space. Still a large outdoor house!

Remember to sign up for—and tell your friends about—this year’s all-new, always-free Less Lawn More Life challenge before Dr. Robin Kimmerer kicks it off on May 7.

Join the Less Lawn More Life challenge

For the kids, I suggest leaving a big, rectangular sports field and buying or building an equipment shed. A full-size high school soccer goal is 24 feet wide. Using the golden ratio as a starting point, you might make a 30 by 48 foot games field. To balance the visual weight of the goal, consider aligning a generous equipment shed longwise along the opposite end. (Check out Reeds Ferry, which built ours, for examples of attractive, well-constructed sheds. Pete’s going to DIY the next one. Stay tuned.)

That still leaves 3,000 square feet for your other garden rooms. In fact, even if you make a generous dining area and outdoor kitchen, an edibles garden, and a 4-foot wide path circling the house, you’ll still have space for more rooms or plants. Plus, when the children are older, you can transform the equipment shed into a gym, studio, or office.

What fun!

Dear Design Your Wild, What’s the smallest pond that can be sustained without an external filter and pump.—Teresa

A large container—say, 24 inches wide by 18 inches deep, placed in a sunny spot. You’ll recall that in our “How to Build a Wildlife Pond” workshop, Robert Pavlis recommended covering at least a third of the surface area with plants. One native fragrant water lily (Nymphaea odorata) is sufficient, though an additional tall margin plant ups the drama. Expect to divide the water lily each spring to avoid overcrowding (less often with bigger ponds).

Contrary to most of what you’ll read online, wash off any soil from the roots and replant them in gravel or rocks at their preferred depth. And do not fertilize. Add a large rock or two so birds can bathe and other critters can climb out. If mosquitoes are a problem, add a Dunk or tiny gambusia fish; eventually, dragonfly larvae should control the mosquito larvae.

Dear Design Your Wild, Is there a specific distance from your house that you need to build a pond? Also, is there any issue with dogs and ponds? (I have two labs.)—Nancy-Jean

Distance from the house is mostly a matter of design—which you know all about;) Think proportion: a small pond to view from a patio near the house, a large pond as a destination further away. We are so enjoying watching the birds splashing and dragonflies zipping around our new pond, about 14 feet from our patio seating and 35 feet from our dining room window.

As for dogs, we’re training Sukey, successfully so far, not to drink from or go into the pond. Patti Cochran of Ohio, on the other hand, built a sturdy pond where her dogs enjoy swimming (and shared this gorgeous reel).

I used RPE liner and sandwiched it between underlayment to make sure dogs cannot puncture liner. As far as plants go, the worst thing they do is maybe tip one over. My 40 [pound] dog swims in pond; my big 90 pound dog just likes to get in and cool off, no swimming. —Building Natural Ponds Facebook Group

Your pond, your dogs, your choice.

Why, How, Wow!

Why? The golden ratio appears often in nature.

Yesterday, I planted 50 wood ferns from four-inch pots, some with their fiddleheads still unfurling. Fiddleheads, nautilus shells, and the arrangement of seeds in a sunflower and leaves around a stem all reflect the golden ratio.

Like pi, the golden ratio—known to mathematicians as phi—is a constant found in nature. Phi equals approximately 1.618. (It’s an irrational number, like pi, so the decimal places continue on and on to infinity.) There’s a mathematical formula, but the ratio is most associated with the Fibonacci sequence, where each number is the sum of the two preceding ones, as in: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, etc. Throughout the sequence, the ratio between consecutive numbers closely approximates the golden ratio, becoming closer and closer to it as the sequence progresses.

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In a Renaissance book illustrated by Leonardo da Vinci, friar and mathematician Luca Pacioli suggested the ratio was divine, sent from heaven by the “Supreme Architect.” Generations of designers have used the ratio to establish structural order, including Modernists like architect Le Corbusier and painter Piet Mondrian. However, studies have failed to prove its innate superiority, which is why Zoe and I use it loosely.

[C]ritics argue that prevalence of the divine ratio in nature is often exaggerated, or the result of confirmation bias or selective measurement. Many of these occurrences are approximations rather than exact matches, not least because the golden ratio cannot be applied precisely because it’s an irrational number. What’s more, measurements are too often imprecise or even subjective, taken between points according to the chosen narrative.—Discovery UK

How: The golden ratio and garden rooms

Using plants to divide outdoor spaces into geometric rooms makes a yard feel larger—there’s more to explore—and its spaces more comfortable and intimate. I recommend designing your yard plan around spaces where humans feel comfortable, as opposed to around planting beds, to make a garden where humans will want to spend time. And the wildlife couldn’t care less about the shape of your planting beds.

In my new Gainesville garden, I used flags and branches to mark out the human spaces—rooms and the paths that connect them—before we installed any plants. I used ovals and circles, rounded shapes that fit into golden ratio rectangles and squares. (The first rectangle in a Fibonacci sequence is a square, one by one.) It looks crappy right now (let’s face it), but I’m confident it’ll become fabulous and I’ll share its progress over time.

Wow! Dividing outdoor spaces into comfortable places

The picturesque Walk in the Park plantings at the home of Amy Eld, founder of vintage interiors retailer Rock the Heirloom, illustrates transform narrow, shady side yards into pleasant places to stroll by making them appear closer to a golden rectangle. The sculptural tree in the back, planted almost in the middle of the width, makes the length seem shorter than it is. And varied, multilayered shrubs, vines, and trees add visual interest and “blur the boundary,” making the yard feel wider.

The garden behind designer Elizabeth Macfarlane’s Victorian rowhouse illustrates how even a small yard can be divided into multiple golden rectangle rooms. A central bed with evergreen globes divides the yard into three rectangular seating areas and a path. Trees and shrubs around the exterior connect the garden to the broader landscape, making it feel larger, rather than smaller.

‘The garden, like the house, was a complete disaster,’ recalls Elizabeth, who called on garden designer Cali Rand to transform the outdoor space into distinct, functional areas, including a dining space and two separate seating areas. ‘We had some really nice mature trees to work with, and Cali did a really great job of planting out the rest.’—The English Home

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At the back of the yard is what the English call a “garden room”—a separate structure in the garden, not to be confused with a room within the garden—that pulls you through the garden. Macfarlane quips, “The garden room is where we hide all the ugly stuff.” That’s a worthwhile function, too.

Digging deeper

• It’s spring! Time to buy more seating for your yard! But first, review my guide to outdoor furniture, including its dirty downside. I favor buying used; search for quality brands like Fermob, Brown Jordan, Janus et cie., and vintage Salterini and Umanoff. But if you prefer to buy new, check out these Westport chairs (a deal), bistro sets, and luxury brands.

• Removing invasives can seem a Sisyphean task, so this recent headline cheered me: Rat eradication sparks record-breaking seabird breeding on Wake Atoll. It also reminded me that Alberta, Canada, has also eradicated the world’s most costly invasive. There’s hope.

• Margaret Roach’s recent New York Times column explains how to choose the sexiest cultivated varieties of native plants that will also deliver the best ecological performance. [gift link]

Hello, Yardeners!

It’s Zoe, Heather’s daughter, and I’m jumping in to wish you HAPPY EARTH DAY and share something personal. (Don’t worry—my mom will be back next week with her regularly scheduled column!)

As some of you know, I manage the Less Lawn More Life challenge: a free 12-week program helping people turn everyday yards into real habitat. It’s all new this year— new experts, new resources, new tools. It starts May 7 with a live kickoff featuring Robin Wall Kimmerer(!), followed by one simple, expert-guided action each week.

Even if you don’t have a lawn—you have a balcony or live in the woods—you can add more life to your property.

If you do one thing this Earth Day, let it be to go outside and look at some nature. If you do two things, let it be to ask a friend to do the Less Lawn More Life challenge with you!

Join the Free Challenge

If you take the challenge, you’ll get a Wildr Score (basically a land health checkup), weekly challenges to help improve it, and a community of people doing this work right alongside you. Whether you’re new to habitat gardening or a long time rewilder, there is something new to learn for everyone. BTW even if you took it last year, the content is completely revamped—and this year you’ll also be the very first people to use a brand new tool I’ve helped build called Wildr Places. (More on that below.)

All of this work is rooted in something deeply personal to me: my sister Eva, who died two years ago, and what her death taught me about how intertwined we are with nature. How new life can come out of grief, even when someone you love is gone forever. I wrote it all down below.

Thanks, as always, for being on this wild ride with us,

—Zoe

For Eva

Turning loss into something that grows

Sunday was the anniversary of my sister Eva’s death. Those of you who have been with us for two years may remember my mom’s post about it.

That May, my sisters and mom and I planted an Eastern Redbud (Cercis canadensis) with her ashes in my backyard in ceremony. Today, her tree is blooming in full force on the anniversary of her death. When I look at its tiny flowers, I see life, grief, the complexity of humanness in its little pink buds. My sister is gone, but caring for her tree gives me purpose. She feeds the bees, she holds the water, she’s found new life. And for me this is a way to remember all the ways Eva is still with me.

My mom named us well. Eva means life in Hebrew. Zoe means life in Greek.

We are life.

We are not separate from nature, we are nature. And remembering that has been such a wellspring of energy for me since she died.

Grief, dirt, purpose

Before Eva died, I was just starting to learn what land could be. Mom and I had built “Transform Your Yard,” our first course together—14 weeks of teaching people to design yards they love.

A week before the course wrapped, my sister died unexpectedly.

My garden became something different for me after that. First, a place to weed with abandon while I worked through rage and sorrow and confusion. My family did a ceremony to plant a tree for Eva. My sisters Lila and Sofi, my mom, and I held her ashes in our bare hands and put them in the hole in the earth, burning wish paper as we sent our prayers out. We planted the redbud tree together in my backyard and filled the hole back up with soil, adding water. I had to care for it (and the hundreds of other plants I planted that summer).

Later that year I turned all my energy and lack of agency over her death into more things I can actually do. Things that fill my cup and give me purpose and remind me we are not alone. I guess I tried to transform her death into more ways to bring life into the world.

Little did I know that just a couple years later, mom and I would be name-dropped by Margaret Roach in her interview with Becca Rodomsky-Bish, alongside native plant champions like Doug Tallamy and Benjamin Vogt. Or that I would be designing the very tools I wished existed so more people could do this thing I love. I wish Eva was here so I could tell her all my updates until she shouted at me “no more native plant talk!!”

What I told Eva as I planted

Eva and I both cared deeply about making a positive impact on this world. She told deep stories through film and humor. I try to find ways to make a difference on our land and in our local communities. We were both so, so proud of each other. And the way Eva would proudly tell people about things her older sister was doing… I carry that with me.

This year, I planted 100 tree and shrub seedlings around my yard on the second anniversary of Eva’s death. Adding to my memorial garden, our shared legacy.

And as I planted, I told Eva things that I’m proud of.

Digging in the dirt, I caught her up. Since she died, I got my master naturalist certification from Cornell. I started a coalition to protect my local creek from wastewater pollution and joined my local watershed community’s leadership team. I founded an ecological hunting alliance to protect our forests. I taught tens of thousands of people to design outdoor spaces with my mom, and we just submitted a book proposal to our agent.

I told her how I met Joanna Hall and the Plan it Wild team who founded Less Lawn More Life and Wildr, and how we’re building something together now that’s bigger than any of us. How I helped develop a science-based methodology to recommend native plants and presented it to Doug Tallamy and other heroes of mine. How I've helped build an app so more people can discover the magic of bringing life to their yard. How many incredible partners and individuals we talk with every day, and the way it's all growing together like a mycelial web. Every day it feels like the universe needs it to happen.

And how in two weeks, I’ll be moderating a Q&A with Robin Wall Kimmerer.

Join me & Dr. Kimmerer

Find your fireflies

Last year I was just helping with Less Lawn More Life. This year I’m leading it, and we’ve totally revamped the content. (I’m especially excited about the whole new challenge around water conservation & protection this year.)

Twelve weeks, weekly challenges with free resources, webinars with experts.

If you do one thing, just read each email.
Two things, plant something native for someone you miss.
Three things, notice a new bird or bug.

And maybe it’ll change your life like it changed mine. At minimum, you’ll have some smiles and fun.

Join the Challenge

(Eva was the most New York City it girl you could imagine. Shovels, no way. But lightening bugs? Hell yeah. My sisters and I all loved those since we were kids, finding them in the middle of the East Village on our rooftop. And later Eva wanted to know how to protect fireflies on her little Brooklyn balcony. We can all do something, you just gotta find your own fireflies. The challenge can show you many ways you can make a difference—even doing just one thing matters.)

What grows from here

The new tool, Wildr Places, is in beta. We’re building it into a personalized native plant and habitat guide for your specific yard, and we’ll grow into that vision with your help.

The plants it recommends aren’t random. They’re the ones that specialist bees, butterflies, and moths depend on—species that are disappearing because the specific plants they need are disappearing too. When you plant them, you’re giving those struggling beings a chance.

In the app, you can see the species in my memorial garden for Eva. I hope it inspires you to plant something for someone you love.

And you don’t need a yard to do this. A single pot on a balcony counts. Less Lawn More Life is just a way of saying: wherever you are, make more life.

Less Lawn More Life

This work changed my life. Not just the challenge, but everything about restoring nature and nurturing struggling species and watching the life we can steward. It’s about agency. Being able to do something in my own backyard when so much feels out of my control. It’s about beauty and design, and creating a place that pulls me outside into the sun so I feel the breeze on my face and remember why I do this.

Eva’s tree is blooming right now. I think she’s proud of me.

P.S. We're not doing this alone. Less Lawn More Life is a grassroots campaign now backed by a whole crew of habitat heroes and conservation orgs, with more joining every day.

Dear Design Your Wild, How do you take care of these large patches of plants?—Design workshop participant

By thinking in terms of “patches of plants,” not individual plants or even “garden,” you’re halfway to the ecological care mindset: You are nurturing a community. It’s a light touch. Once roots have established after planting, your plant community will largely care for itself.

Caring for your native habitat

After the weather warms in spring to a consistent 50 degrees or more, I may chop or stomp (yes) dead perennial stalks that look unattractive, leaving non-invasive material on the ground, a technique called “chop and drop.” I aim to leave 18-inch stalks for native bees and other insects to use the following winter. Just as often, I leave the dead stalks entirely, knowing they will soon deteriorate or be hidden by new growth. You might find it easier to maintain a larger meadow by having a brush mower cut back everything—most importantly emerging shrubs and trees–every other spring.

In northern states mid-late April should be the earliest you consider cutting back perennials and clearing garden debris. Keep in mind that some bees don’t emerge until late May, so the longer you can tolerate your “messy” garden the better.—Xerces Society

During the growing season, I stroll around my yard with nippers, roughly weekly, and I edit. I remove any invasives I happen to see pop up—cutting the seeders and pulling the rhizotomous ones. (See The Latest on Weeds: Startling insight on why you’ve been removing weeds wrong your whole life). As my patches of native plants fill in, there are fewer invasives to cut.

I also edit native plants: If the woodland sunflowers obscure the sphinxes that guard our front door, I cut them back. If there’s a black-eyed Susan in my purple garden, I cut that to the ground, too. If a native shrub or tree seeds into a meadow area, I cut it back, too.

Someday, maybe, I’ll prune some shrubs to maintain their shapes, best done soon after flowering, as a rough rule. (For how to prune young trees, see To Prune or Not to Prune.) If I had a problem with too tall plants toppling over, I might Chelsea chop next season. I DON’T mulch, fertilize, add compost, weed, irrigate, deadhead, or do “fall cleanup.”

The Zen of hand watering

Most of the work of transforming a yard from turf to native habitat is removing invasives initially, seeding or installing lots and lots of plants, and then watering newly planted areas. Watering is key.

After killing dozens of plants from neglect (OK, hundreds, but who’s counting? … Oops, Pete’s counting and says it’s more like thousands), I have learned to embrace the Zen of hand watering new plantings. I water deeply the base of all new forbs, shrubs, and trees by hose once a week (see “How” below), often while listening to a podcast. To remember to water, I put a “task” in my calendar and move it forward a week when I complete it; if we get an inch of rain, I move the task forward and skip a week. If you don’t have time to hand water, then use a soaker hose, especially around the base of new trees and shrubs.

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When you hand water weekly, you’re closely observing your establishing plant communities, so it’s a good time to remove some invasives. Don’t worry about eradication; think “constant gentle pressure,” in the words of restauranteur Danny Meyer.

You’ll also notice if critters are eating your plants and learn strategies to protect them. For example, I have stopped planting perennial plugs in Rhode Island because the rabbits love these short, tender young plants; we outmaneuver the bunnies by growing from seed—too many for them to keep up with—and planting taller, tougher plants. To protect young shrubs and trees from deer, we spray them with minty Deer Out (or use a motion-activated sprinkler) in summer and fence them in winter. (For more on the deer issue, see Keep Your Plants Safe.)

That’s it.

Dear Design Your Wild, I am adding a rock garden with a dry creek bed running through. What would you suggest putting down on the soil before adding the rocks? I don’t like landscape fabric but I also don’t want plants coming up between the rocks. The neighbors have a hill that rainwater rushes down, across the road, and into our front yard–like a river. We have been amending the soil and planting natives for four years, including a Carex matrix with 300 plugs. Very few are coming up.—Annette, Pittsburg, PA

Rock garden or rain garden? In rock gardens, people plant between sizable rocks or in crevices in exposed outcroppings. The plants are usually alpine or other low-growing species that evolved in similar conditions, often requiring little water and organic matter. If that’s what you’re interested in, you can learn more from the North American Rock Garden Society.

Rock gardens are NOT beds of rocks without plants—a perplexing trend for people who have given up on growing things. In areas like Pittsburgh, which gets more than the average 30 inches of rain per year, plants generally grow among and eventually cover the rocks, unless treated with herbicides, whether or not landscape fabric is installed. Beds of rocks are not a sustainable landscape solution in wet climates.

Rain garden basics

In any case, with all that stormwater runoff, what you really need is a rain garden. That means digging a basin (a ditch) to catch the rainwater coming into your property. Your rain garden might include a rocky dry creek bed where the water enters the basin, because—as you found—rushing water will indeed wash away plants and soil. In rain gardens, plants, not rocks, increase the amount of water that infiltrates into the soil.

Your native plant plugs washed away because the small, young plants were no match for the rushing water. In addition, the most common Carex (pensylvanica), doesn’t like too much water. In a rain garden, water will pool at the bottom, not flow, and plants like the ones below that like their feet wet will thrive.

For DIY rain garden construction details, watch This Old House’s How To Create a Rain Garden, but skip the landscape fabric. You can use horticultural vinegar to remove emerging plants from among the river rocks, if you like. But really, if plants eventually cover your dry creek bed, so much the better.

—Heather

Why, How, Wow!

Why? Rainwater, good; stormwater runoff, bad

Have you ever wondered how much water falls onto your yard during a rainstorm? For example, an inch of rain on an average 13,000 lot produces 8,000 gallons of water—more if you’re receiving runoff from the road or other lots, like my reader. That’s almost a month of indoor water for an average household.

In naturally vegetated landscapes, most of this stormwater absorbs into the soil or evaporates or is transpired by plants, leaving little runoff. In cities, where much of the ground is covered by impervious surfaces—buildings, roads, parking lots, etc.—more than half the total rainfall may become runoff, causing a raft of problems. Lawns contribute to the runoff problem, because they absorb one tenth as much rainwater as natural vegetation, according to the EPA.

Stormwater is a significant source of water pollution and a public health concern for communities across the country. Many have been experiencing stormwater impacts from climate change that have led to flooding, water quality impairments, and soil erosion, with low-income and underserved communities especially feeling the harmful effects.—EPA Report to Congress

Replacing lawn with native plants can solve water incursion problems that are commonly addressed with expensive, professional installations like French drains. Rain gardens can control more extreme runoff challenges.

How: Watering after planting

The roots of newly installed plants establish most successfully when watered regularly and deeply. Once they are established, stop watering please—they’ll thrive and you’ll be protecting our depleting aquifers.

If you receive four inches or more of rain in a month, it’s likely you can avoid supplemental watering during that period, so it’s helpful to time plantings based on expected rainfall, which you can find by searching your location and then scrolling to “Average Monthly Rainfall” at weatherspark.com.

Here are detailed watering guidelines from my friends at Bee Good Landscape in Gainesville, Florida, based on nationally-relevant research by Edward Gilman and others at the University of Florida.

All plants

• Water in the morning, before 10 a.m..

• Water the base of the plant. Leaves and stems do not need to be watered, so concentrate water on the roots. With this in mind, do not use a sprinkler, but direct water by hand or use a soaker or temporary micro irrigation system.

• Do not water if it has rained half an inch within the last day or if the soil around the root ball is saturated.

• Monitor for signs of drought stress like wilting or yellowing leaves, and water before leaves start to fall. This should be continued even after establishment in cases of severe drought.

• Establishment can take up to a year or more for trees and shrubs. Larger trees can need supplemental watering for up to 3 years. Once your plants no longer wilt without watering, they are considered established.

Trees

• <2 inch diameter trunk, 2-3 gallons (e.g., one minute at full pressure on “shower” setting) daily for 2 weeks; every other day for two months; then weekly until establishment

• >2-4 inch diameter trunk, 4-12 gallons daily for one month, every other day for three months, weekly until established

• >4” diameter trunk, >12 gallons daily for six weeks, every other day for five months, weekly until established

  In cooler hardiness zones, in all but the driest years, irrigation on spring and summer planted trees can usually be discontinued once fall color has begun; irrigate fall planted trees several times and continue until foliage has dropped from the deciduous trees in the region. In warmer climates, irrigate fall and winter planted trees as described for the spring and summer planted trees.—University of Florida

Shrubs

• Frequent shallow waterings are better for establishment than less frequent, deeper waterings. Consistency is key!

• As little as one gallon (e.g., 20 seconds at full pressure on “shower” setting) every eight days may be sufficient to establish a shrub.

• Shrubs planted under existing trees are competing with an established root system and require extra water.

• More frequent watering may increase the vitality of your shrubs.

Herbaceous plants

• Check the soil moisture by sticking a finger half an inch into the soil. If the soil is dry, water your newly planted plants. (Fall-seeded plants do not require watering except in extreme drought.)

• Allow soil to dry out between waterings.

• Look for signs of drought stress like wilting, and water as necessary. It is normal for plants to wilt in the heat of the day, but if they do not perk up in the evening, they are not receiving sufficient water.

Wow! Made in the shade

This month’s Gardens Illustrated, the UK’s leading horticulture magazine, features the Garden in the Woods in Massachusetts. Such shade gardens shine in spring, when many native shrubs flower and ephemeral wildflowers rush to bloom before the canopy above them leafs out. Director of horticulture Uli Lorimer told writer Matt Collins,

It’s that marriage of horticulture and botany together that excites me the most about this garden.—Uli Lorimer

Uli also named his top eight woodland plants, native to the northeast (and, often, beyond):

1. Yellow trillium (Trillium luteum)

2. Great white trillium (Trillium grandiflorum)

3. Creeping dogwood (Cornus canadensis)—a fabulous spreading groundcover in northern states

4. Purple pitcher plant (Sarracenia purpurea)

5. Red columbine (Aquilegia canadensis)

6. Wild strawberry (Fragaria virginiana)--another fabulous spreading groundcover, native almost nationwide

7. Yellow lady’s slipper (Cypripedium parviflorum)

8. Flowering dogwood (Cornus florida)

Garden in the Woods provides niche conditions for a range of native plants, from low drifts of colourful Phlox divaricata ‘Blue Moon’ and P. stolonifera ‘Sherwood Purple,’ and clumps of yellow Trillium luteum to flowering shrubs including American holly (Ilex opaca) and Carolina rhododendron (Rhododendron minus).—Gardens Illustrated

Yellow roundleaf ragwort (Packera obovata) and pink Geranium maculatum edge a stretch of the mile-long network of trails that weave through the garden.—Gardens Illustrated

Trillium luteum. The luminous yet refined yellow trillium (pictured here with blue Phlox divaricata) is citrus-scented and ephemeral, retreating underground after spring.—Gardens Illustrated

Digging Deeper

• An analysis of data from 75 countries confirms that nature connectedness predicts well-being (PsyPost)

• Widely used pesticides linked to 150% higher cancer risk (SciTechDaily)

• In Norway, a spruce and a spider get a voice in a multispecies assembly (Guardian)

Quick note from Zoe: Happy Spring, everyone!!! Did you know that April is National Native Plant Month? I just love how much this movement is growing. 🌱

And if you know your native plants, I have a favor to ask… The Less Lawn More Life challenge is back this May, now powered by a new tool we’ve been building at Wildr. At its core is a native plant recommendation engine grounded in research, real data, and on-the-ground knowledge… and we need your help to make that happen.

So if you're a botanist, ecologist, master gardener, or just someone who knows your ecoregion's native plants inside and out—PLEASE apply to be a Wildr Expert!

Now, back to Heather!…

Dear Design Your Wild, Do you have any thoughts on permeable pavers like True Grid?? I have thought about this where I help garden (adding many natives). On the grounds, we have a path which is gravel, many years old and gets very weedy. We would like it to be ADA compliant for our cane, walker, and wheelchair users. This is a non-profit religious place with not a lot of money, lots done by volunteers.—Esther, Rochester New York

Not a fan. There are other options that are permeable and ADA compliant—and not plastic. The emerging research on microplastics has hit me like a ton of bricks, so I’m trying to avoid it whenever possible—in the landscape, on my body, in my home (see “Why?” below).

True Grid “pavers” are plastic grids designed to hold gravel in place or create a hard surface under turf. They claim to be ADA compliant, but in my experience such grids become exposed over time and represent a tripping hazard, especially for cane users.

According to the federal agency that develops and maintains requirements under ADA,

Most loose materials, including gravel, will not meet these requirements unless properly treated to provide sufficient surface integrity and resilience. Binders, consolidants, compaction, and grid forms may enable some of these materials to perform satisfactorily but require repeated maintenance.—U.S. Access Board

ADA compliant paths from natural materials

If the current path is straight and its surface even, your least expensive option might be to cover it with Cocopath, an all-natural coir version of the mats used to make beaches accessible.

Wood decking is another accessible, permeable path surface. If you have volunteer carpenters, the cost can be quite reasonable. The lumber and concrete deck blocks for a four-foot-wide path we’re building between our ponds cost $4.50 per square foot.

An option used in major ecological landscaping projects like Brooklyn Bridge Park and the Old Chicago Post Office rooftop is decomposed granite with Organic-Lock stabilizer, sold by Kafka Granite in the U.S. and Envirobond in Canada. The plant-based stabilizer makes the path wheelchair-safe while allowing water to pass through. Installation requires digging the path below grade, laying four inches of stone, then compacting three inches of stabilized decomposed granite. Too much for your volunteers? Have them check out Kafka’s installation video.

Brick, stone, and concrete pathways can also be made permeable and ADA compliant. They are more expensive than decomposed granite and require a similarly deep base of crushed stone (and sand) to remain smooth and level.

Dear Design Your Wild, One thing I don’t like is all the mosquitoes in my yard. Is there a recommendation to get rid of the mosquitoes? Or what do you do with this situation?

You’re in good company! So many readers complain about mosquitos that I delved deep into the research and even visited a Florida mosquito lab. You’ll most likely want to implement a combination of strategies to maximize enjoyment of your yard. For my top recommendations, including which repellents to use, how to eliminate breeding areas, and how to build a DIY screen house, read Avoid Mosquito Bites in Your Yard.

—Heather

Why, How, Wow!

Why? Microplastics everywhere

All of a sudden, scientists are finding microplastics everywhere—in our bodies, in organic vegetables, and even in remote forests.

They drift in through the air, settle onto leaves high in the canopy, and slowly make their way down to the forest floor. Over time, they build up in the soil, turning forests into hidden storage sites for plastic pollution. … To understand how this buildup happens, researchers studied several forest sites in Germany. … Using advanced measurement techniques, they traced how much plastic had accumulated and where it came from. … Their findings suggest that forests have been collecting airborne plastic since at least the 1950s.—earth.com

Although these plastic bits have been building in us and our environments for decades, little is known about their impact on us and the ecosystems we inhabit. Nor is much known about the PFAs (“forever chemicals”) used to make plastics resistant to heat, oil, stains, grease, and water, but what is known is deeply frightening.

While less than 1 percent of the 12,000 or so PFAS compounds have been tested for toxicity, the (abbreviated) list of maladies linked to them, even at tiny concentrations, includes decreased fertility, pregnancy complications, weakened immune systems, kidney and testicular cancers, liver damage, obesity, and hormone interference, according to a review of the scientific literature by the Environmental Protection Agency. Infant deaths tripled for mothers living downstream from PFAS-contaminated water, a 2025 study found.—The Washington Post [gift link]

The solutions to microplastic and PFA pollution will be big and systemic—like plastic-eating bacteria, plant-based plastics, and large-scale PFA filters. But while scientists develop these, I’m trying to decrease my use of plastic, especially with respect to sources of microplastics, both to lessen my personal impact and to send a message to manufacturers that consumers don’t want plastic. I’ve found the easiest way to do this is to stop buying synthetic textiles.

Fleece jackets, yoga pants, polyester shirts, nylon leggings, microfiber cloths, and other synthetic textiles are the largest source of microplastics. For me, it’s easy to limit my new clothing to wool, linen, cotton, silk, and rayon/viscose (sometimes with a bit of synthetic for stretch). I’m also looking into washing machine filters, because a single wash of synthetic clothing can release hundreds of thousands of fibers. (Please let me know in the comments if you’ve done the research and can recommend a filter.)

How: Reducing plastic in the yard

Contemporary landscaping involves a lot of plastic, too. Here’s how I’m trying to avoid introducing them into my yard:

• Recycling plastic nursery pots or giving them to a small nursery that will reuse them.

• Not buying bags of soil, fertilizer, or other amendments. (If you missed it, read Why the World Needs “Bad” Soil.)

• Never using landscape fabric, which doesn’t work anyway. (Read Cass Marketos’ On the Problem of Landscape Tarp.)

• Favoring wood and metal patio furniture. Keep in mind that vinyl, acrylic (used to make Sunbrella), and polyester filling are all forms of plastic. So is much outdoor furniture marketed as “rope” or “rattan.”

• Stopping solarizing with plastic.

• Banning plastic edging and vinyl fencing.

• Choosing tools made of wood and/or metal whenever possible.

After much research into alternatives, however, I concluded that plastic pond liners are currently the most feasible option that’s healthy for other organisms. Galvanized steel, for example, leaches zinc, which can be toxic to fish. Concrete is difficult to work with, not a sustainable material, and risks creating a big concrete mistake—and related waste. To me, the wildlife value of backyard ponds offsets the negative effect of the plastic. Within a day of installing our ponds this month, more birds and butterflies arrived in our yard.

Wow! Natural, ADA compliant pathways

Terremoto landscape architects used decomposed granite paths and wood bridges to connect areas of a shared community garden in Riverside, California. The garden also includes bleacher seating, a large central meeting tree, an activity plaza, vegetable beds, a stormwater swale and vibrant native plantings. Around the garden are 1920s craftsman-style bungalows developed as a safe, inclusive, and nurturing environment for the formerly homeless, LGBTQ+ community, senior citizens, and young people coming out of the foster care system.

In addition to converting the bungalows into transitional housing for up to 50 persons, the [Hopson Rodstrom Design] architects incorporated covered porches that modulate between the homes with some jutting out and others wrapping around corners at the rear of each house. Simple yet substantial, these shaded outdoor spaces sport wood decking and standing-seam metal roofing painted to match the house color. They help foster a neighborly environment for the residents but also act as transition zones between each of the homes and the public garden.—Terremoto

Final Live Webinar for Premium Subscribers

Here’s Exactly How to Build Your Wildlife Pond

Tuesday, April 7, 6 pm E.T.
If you’ve always wanted to create a small pond but have been too intimidated to start, this is for you. Wildlife need clean drinking water to survive and many threatened species breed or live in water. Unfortunately, many sources make pond building overly complicated—and less valuable for wildlife. By the time you leave this interview with author of Building Natural Ponds (and Garden Myths) Robert Pavlis, you’ll be ready to build your wildlife pond—without pumps, filters, or chemicals.

Can’t make the live webinar date? The recording will be available for a limited time after the event and will be shared with people who registered in advance.

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Subscribe now to receive the registration link, plus recordings of our sketching and small yard design workshops.

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Dear Design Your Wild, I am helping my niece with her 1990s first home and backyard planning—not a single tree, on a hill, corner lot, terrible soil, not even grass grows. I think the first year will focus mainly on soil building for future planting beds… A colleague at the extension office said many homes built in this time period had the top soil scraped off and the homeowner had the option to buy it; many didn’t.—Nancy, Burlington, WI

“Not even grass grows!” If I had a penny for every time I’ve heard that, I’d have… um,... at least a dollar. European cold season turf grasses—which make up lawns in northern states—are NOT the easiest plants in the world to grow. Sure, they germinate quickly. But if they were easy to maintain, we wouldn’t have a $12 billion per year lawn chemical industry.

My attitude toward soil is similar to the Scandinavian attitude toward weather and clothes: There’s no bad soil, only bad plants. The idea of “poor soil” comes from agriculture, the source of many incorrect notions about ornamental horticulture. By all means, one soil will grow bigger tomatoes than another. But nutrient-dense agricultural soil favors invasive plants and makes native perennials grow so fast and tall they flop over. As always, the north star is right plant, right place.

Yes, the developer of your niece’s lot probably scraped off and sold elsewhere the top soil that had developed there over hundreds of years. The inorganic subsoil that remained—a mixture of clay, sand, silt, and broken-down rock—compacted into a stable, solid base for the foundation, preventing settling over time. This subsoil lacks organic material, but there are plants that evolved to grow in similar conditions.

Whole communities need “bad” soil

Flash floods, landslides, glacial movement, even wildfires can expose subsoil or deplete the soil of organic material. The plants that manage to establish and grow in the aftermath of such disturbances are called “pioneer species.” Their roots and shoots—but mostly roots—develop the soil structure that enables other species to follow.

Fungi, insects, birds and other wildlife also evolved to live in these disturbed environments. In fact, areas where topsoil has been removed are so valuable to invertebrates that they are classified as priority habitat in the UK. To maximize biodiversity, British horticulturalist John Little plants into sand, crushed construction waste, and even crushed asphalt and coal.

Many of the aggregates have very low nutrient levels allowing wildflowers to thrive without grasses and other plants out-competing them. ... To reduce fertility and increase the stress, so plant communities evolve more slowly, John sometimes strips the topsoil and uses it elsewhere, such as a vegetable patch.—Royal Horticultural Society

Plants build soil best

My recommendation? Save time and money by skipping the “building the soil” stage and start planting pioneer species that will do the work for you—and do it better. Recent research shows it’s the roots, not the shoots used to create compost, that build soil structure (see “Why?”). An added benefit is that you and your niece can support the wildlife that depend on them, as well as create privacy for her, by installing pioneer plants on her property (e.g., quaking aspen, paper birch, jack pine, sand cherry, prairie willow, American hazelnut, sweetfern). As maturing Wisconsin forests shift toward shade-tolerant species, forest species adapted to disturbance are in decline.

So here’s some exciting news: World-renowned Roy Diblik’s nursery, Northwind Perennial Farm, is in your hometown! Diblik has been a longtime partner of Dutch garden designer Piet Oudolf and, for example, played a crucial role in the creation of Chicago’s Lurie Garden in Millennium Park, growing, supplying, and helping to install more than 25,000 perennials for the project. Ask his team to recommend plants that will thrive in the conditions on your niece’s lot.

Happy digging!

—Heather

Why, How, Wow!

Why? Healthy soil = lots of necromass

As Robert Pavlis of Garden Myths points out,

The latest studies show that the best way to build healthy soil is with necromass. Necromass is defined as a collection of dead organisms, but in soil it consists mostly of dead microbes. Even though most gardeners have never heard of it, it is essential for increasing soil organic carbon and building healthy soil.

Microbes have short lives and naturally die off quickly. … Accumulated necromass is responsible for aggregate formation—that crumbly soil all gardeners want. Better aggregation results in more soil organic carbon, better drainage, better aeration and larger pore spaces for plant roots. These aggregates have been found to be very stable and seem to be the best way to sequester carbon in soil.—Garden Myths

The best way to build necromass is to increase the volume of microbes in the soil by feeding them. And the most efficient way to feed microbes is to grow plants, not add mulch or soil amendments, which are derived from dead plant shoots (above ground material). Microbes expend a lot of energy to decompose the large lignin and cellulose molecules in shoots. In contrast, the “exudates” plants excrete through their roots, which represent up to half the molecules they produce from photosynthesis, are small and easily digested by microbes.

Initially it was thought that exudates consisted mostly of sugars and other carbohydrates but it is now known that they include a wide range of compounds including amino acids, proteins, fatty acids, sterols, anthocyanins and flavonoids, to name a few. …

Some scientists estimate that living roots may be as much as five times more effective at building healthy soil compared to organic matter from shoots.—Garden Myths

How: Keep living roots in the soil all the time.

Based on the latest research, Pavlis concludes,

The new focus should be directed towards growing lots of roots and keeping living roots in the soil all of the time.

Here are my tips for building soil structure ecologically, derived from Pavlis’s analysis:

1. Do not leave soil bare.*

2. Everywhere except paths and rooms, install dense layers deep-rooted of native plants—groundcovers, shrubs, trees. Cover soil around new plants with a temporary mulch of up to three inches of dead leaves.

3. Plant different species to increase the microbe diversity.

4. Disturb soil as little as possible. Tilling destroys the structure of aggregates and speeds up the loss of necromass.

5. Rather than removing turf, consider treating it as a cover crop and plant into turf.

6. Seed bare soil with an inexpensive cover crop like Canada or Virginia wild rye, which will grow quickly while slower perennials and grasses establish.

7. Leave non-seeding weeds unless they are causing a problem. Weed roots are better than no roots.

8. Ensure new plants get enough water to establish (e.g., equivalent to one inch of rain per week for six months).

9. Close the nutrient loop by using “chop and drop" method, leaving dead wood, stems, and leaves to decompose where they fall.

* Leave some sunny, bare soil for bees. Around 70% of native bee species nest in the ground and prefer patches of bare ground without a lot of mulch or dense vegetation. The spaces around native clumping grasses and wildflowers are sufficient. (See Xerces Society’s Clear Space for Bees.)

Wow! Lush gardens through the seasons

Have blooms started to emerge in your area? They have here in north Florida. I’m carefully watching the succession of spring blossoms on native trees and shrubs so I can fill in any gaps in my new garden. So far, in order: flatwoods plum, redbud, red buckeye, fringe tree.

These residential gardens by Northwind Perennial Farm illustrate the succession of perennial blooms from summer through fall. I especially love the pink-white Lindheimer’s beeblossom, native to south Texas and Louisiana.

Digging Deeper

• Love birds? Here’s a secret recording of our Designing Gardens for Birds workshop, hosted last week by Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

• Talk about areas inhospitable to plants, there’s a once-in-a-decade superbloom right now in Death Valley, the driest place in North America and hottest place on earth. Learn more

• Rethinking hardscape: A new analysis finds that some 44% of Los Angeles County’s 312,000 acres of pavement may not be essential for roads, sidewalks or parking, and could be reconsidered. Learn more

• The surprising health benefits of natural light exposure: Even an extra 5 to 10 minutes of sunlight each day can help regulate your sleep, mood and more. Learn more [gift link]

• Planning summer travel? Some of my favorite gardens in the world are on this list of the most beautiful gardens to visit in southern England from Travel & Leisure.

For Premium Subscribers

Ditch the AI, Grab a Tablet: Real Garden Design Sketching

NEXT WEEK: Tuesday, March 24, 6 pm E.T.
Want to actually see what your design will look like before you dig? In this hands-on workshop, artist and landscape designer Liza Kiesler of Viburnum Gardens will teach you (and Zoe and me) to test your ideas by sketching them onto photographs. Sketching will also improve your attention span, ability to stay focused, and your ability to think outside stereotypes (The Cognitive Benefits of Art). No drawing experience necessary—but iPads and Apple Pencils recommended.

Here’s Exactly How to Build Your Wildlife Pond

Tuesday, April 7, 6 pm E.T.
If you’ve always wanted to create a small pond but have been too intimidated to start, this is for you. Wildlife need clean drinking water to survive and many threatened species breed or live in water. Unfortunately, many sources make pond building overly complicated—and less valuable for wildlife. By the time you leave this interview with author of Building Natural Ponds (and Garden Myths) Robert Pavlis, you’ll be ready to build your wildlife pond—without pumps, filters, or chemicals.

Can’t make the live webinar dates? Recordings will be available for a limited time after the event and will only be shared with people who registered in advance.

To register

Subscribe now to receive registration links to all three webinars.

Subscribe now

Already a premium subscriber? Use the registration links here. (If you can see those links, you’re a paying subscriber.)

Dear Design Your Wild, I’m meeting with a landscaper next week and need some concrete (lol!) ideas on materials to replace our badly cracked patio. I have a large, narrow back yard that I plan to “terrace” into rooms to slow water runoff. My rooms will be a patio, a water feature, a bed of native, sun-loving bloomers around a tree, a green space for dogs, and a quiet shady area with a hammock. I have thought about slate, but I don’t want to introduce too many colors. We have a brown deck with black metal railings and my Colonial house is three sides brick, one side hardy plank.—Kim, Richmond, VA

I love your idea for a stepped series of rooms to solve your runoff issues and draw you into your backyard! And I applaud your hesitation about adding another hardscape material. In fact, to keep the materials palette cohesive, I advise planning any retaining walls and steps at the same time, even if you intend to build them later.

In addition to the existing materials, sources of inspiration include local stone, the history of your region, the architecture of your house, and the style of yard you want to create—your yardenality. I also recommend taking into account cost and environmental impact.

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Too often homeowners spend most of their budget on hardscaping, making plants an afterthought. Lush, layered planting will make your back yard fabulous—and absorb much more stormwater than lawn, too. I advise using the minimum amount of hardscape necessary to make your yard a place you and your household will want to spend time and enjoy viewing from inside.

In fact, simply removing your cracked patio and replacing it with a patch of lawn surrounded by native plants is an inexpensive, sustainable, and attractive replacement for your cracked patio. You can certainly enjoy sitting in chairs around a firepit on lawn. Whatever surface you choose for the patio, I suggest moving the patio further away from the house so you can add plenty of green enclosure between the house and the patio, and between the fence and the patio.

Brick hardscaping: Sustainable and chic

A brick—ideally, used brick—patio, steps, and low retaining walls will complement your home’s Colonial style, connect the back of the house to the brick facade, and reflect Richmond history, the spirit of place (”genus loci”). All the historic hidden gardens of Richmond have brick hardscaping. Brick also fits stylistically with the classic design of your black railing. And brick is relatively inexpensive and sustainable and will contrast beautifully with the greenery.

I hope you aren’t scared away by the formality of traditional Virginia gardens with brick walkways, a yardenality Zoe and I call Courtyard Chic. You can certainly incorporate lots of native plants into Courtyard Chic, as in the example below in Texas (with a fence that reminds me of yours). But brick is also characteristic of Blooming Romantic gardens, like Vita Sackville-West’s Sissinghurst.

Timber: Lowest carbon footprint

Or you can lean into the more naturalistic A Walk in the Park yardenality with a wood patio, steps, and/or retaining walls. Natural timber generally has the lowest carbon footprint of any hardscaping material, other than stone, wood chips, or used materials sourced on site or locally. I like timber used sparingly for steps and low retaining walls, like you see below. Wood is lightweight and easy to work with, making it a good DIY choice. It’s not as long lasting as stone, obviously, but it probably lasts long enough. (You may be wondering about pressure treated lumber; see “How” below.)

Tip: To make a wood patio look built-in, build a solid step up to it and choose plants that will hide the edges. If you don’t DIY, you may have to hire a carpenter instead of a landscaper.

Gravel—on its own or in combination

Gravel is another cost-effective, relatively sustainable patio material, which you might combine with brick or timber. For example, you could use brick or timber for the retaining walls, stair risers, and patio edges, then use brown or grey gravel (or natural lawn!) for the stair treads and patio floor. Four to six inches of pea gravel is an inexpensive and relatively sustainable hardscape solution that suits many yardenalities. Small, locally sourced stones cost less, require fewer resources to produce and transport, and—unlike concrete—allow rainwater to soak into the ground instead of being sent elsewhere as runoff.

But pea gravel is not maintenance-free. In Richmond and other areas with adequate rainfall, plants will seed into the gravel and someone will have to remove them periodically—manually, with horticultural vinegar or, as Zoe does, with a blow torch (seriously). Whatever you do, do not use landscape cloth underneath; it does not prevent weeds and eventually breaks down into a mess of plastic bits, leaching toxic microplastics into groundwater that eventually find their way into our drinking water (and bodies).

Above all, enjoy!

—Heather

P.S. Curious about yardenalities? Read Design Shortcut for a Backyard Makeover: Yardenalities™ 2.0.

Why, How, Wow!

Why? The cost, climate, and ecology calculus

I love the clarity of planting natives: It’s a good thing. Unfortunately, choosing the “best” hardscape material requires balancing competing priorities with inadequate information. When adding a new surface, permeability is a must. Using natural materials sourced on site—e.g., branches, wood chips, rocks, shells—is always a good thing. Beyond that, we must each develop our own imperfect algorithms to balance cost, carbon footprint, ecological impact, and personal health and enjoyment.

To assist your decision making, here is some data on cost and global warming potential of various hardscape materials. Unfortunately, I was unable to a comparable comparison of the ecological impact of chemicals leaching from these materials into the soil and groundwater—something I’m trying to take into account in my own yard.

How: My personal algorithm in practice

For a 20 to 25 foot walkway from the existing cement patio between two ponds to our backyard, I’ve been researching pressure treated pine, given its much lower cost compared to natural cedar (about a quarter of the price) and its ready availability in the sizes we need. Beyond our little yard, safe, inexpensive, long-lasting timber is important to solving the housing crisis with the lowest climate impact.

It turns out most online information about pressure-treated wood is obsolete. Arsenic hasn’t been used for residential applications for more than 20 years, for example. Nor is copper or other heavy metals used to treat the Severe Weather brand available at our local Lowe’s.

Severe Weather treated lumber contributes points toward a building's certification under the National Green Building Standard™. According Dupont, the biocide used in Severe Weather (DCOI) biodegrades quickly in both soil and water (see details here). But I’m skeptical of any biocide—and especially skeptical of what chemical companies claim about the safety of their products.

What would you choose if you were me—cedar or Severe Weather pressure treated lumber?

Wow! Recycled bricks add style in native gardens

Prism Landscapes designed this beautiful, informal yard with recycled brick, gravel, and native plants.

Digging Deeper

• A new study in the journal Science suggests the need to plant natives to support birds is even more pressing than previously thought: population decline among a quarter of tracked species is accelerating. Declines are greatest in warmer areas, such as the Southeast, while acceleration is greatest in areas of agricultural intensity. To learn more about how to help turn this around, join Zoe and me this Sunday at 5 pm E.T. for a free yard design workshop focusing on features for birds through Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Register here.

• In an article about glyphosate driving a rift in MAHA, Scientific American describes why its impact on humans is difficult to nail down, with this frightening conclusions:

“We’re just at the beginning of studying glyphosate, but we absolutely must study it, given it is the most commonly used herbicide in the world,” she says. “Even a small, tiny effect, if it’s real, can have a huge public health impact because so many people would be exposed.”—Scientific American

For Premium Subscribers

Ditch the AI, Grab a Tablet: Real Garden Design Sketching

Tuesday, March 24, 6 pm E.T.
Want to actually see what your design will look like before you dig? In this hands-on workshop, artist and landscape designer Liza Kiesler of Viburnum Gardens will teach you (and Zoe and me) to test your ideas by sketching them onto photographs. Sketching will also improve your attention span, ability to stay focused, and your ability to think outside stereotypes (The Cognitive Benefits of Art). No drawing experience necessary—but iPads and Apple Pencils recommended.

Here’s Exactly How to Build Your Wildlife Pond

Tuesday, April 7, 6 pm E.T.
If you’ve always wanted to create a small pond but have been too intimidated to start, this is for you. Wildlife need clean drinking water to survive and many threatened species breed or live in water. Unfortunately, many sources make pond building overly complicated—and less valuable for wildlife. By the time you leave this interview with scientist and author of Building Natural Ponds Robert Pavlis, you’ll be ready to build your wildlife pond—without pumps, filters, or chemicals.

Can’t make the live webinar dates? Recordings will be available for a limited time after the event and will only be shared with people who registered in advance.

To register

Subscribe now to receive registration links to all three webinars.

Subscribe now

Already a premium subscriber? Use the registration links here. (If you can see those links, you’re a paying subscriber.)

Dear Yardener,

There’s still time to register for tonight’s workshop, Plan Now for a Small Backyard You’ll Love [registration info below], our first winter webinar. I’m so excited to share the new process we’ve developed to quickly design restorative small (200 to 2,000 square foot) outdoor spaces. But the steps to a fabulous yard are essentially the same whether you have 200 square feet or 18 acres. Here’s an overview, originally published three years ago and updated with our latest methodologies.

—Heather

Dear Design Your Wild, My wife and I bought an 18-acre farm-turned-golf course, complete with six acres of greens and an acre pond. The rest of the property is wooded. We’d love to restore it into a permaculture wonderland, full of botanical surprises and sacred space. We planted a small wildflower meadow and an orchard in the front yard. However, we need a bigger vision to create something beautiful (and environmentally responsible) for our family’s future. We’re on a limited budget and will be doing a lot of the work ourselves.—Christof, Freedom, ME

“Botanical surprises and sacred space.” I love that! Here’s how to create a bigger vision—a overall plan that you’ll implement over many years. It will help you prioritize, budget, establish appropriate scale, minimize regrets, and bolster your patience.

Step 1: Imagining

What features and destinations can you imagine drawing you into your landscape so you can fully occupy it? In our follow-up Zoom conversation, you mentioned several uses in addition to the meadow and orchard: a vegetable garden, a rose garden, a sauna hut, and a path and chapel in the woods. You’ll also want an outdoor sitting and eating area off the house and a large, flat grassy area for outdoor games like boules, badminton, and croquet. What else? A labyrinth? Allee? Treehouse? And how about practical needs—privacy hedges, parking spaces?

Let your imagination run wild, fueled by travel, fantasy, and favorite activities. Visit public and private gardens for ideas, paying attention to uses, shapes, and scale—the width of paths, the depth of a flower border, the height of a hedge, the diameter of a seating area—rather than plants.

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Step 2: Surveying and mapping the landscape

To scale and locate your destinations appropriately, it’s essential to place them into a map of your property and its existing conditions—i.e., whatever you intend to keep. These conditions include the house, barn, driveway, parking area, pond, major plantings, and underground utilities. Start with a Google satellite image of the entire property, plus any surveys and floorplans you already have. 

A rough sketch is sufficient for big properties like yours. But even you will benefit from a detailed sketch of smaller garden rooms like your seating and easting areas and vegetable garden. Start with a scale outline on graph paper (1/4” = 1’ scale), orienting your survey as if viewed from front door looking out; you will experience your landscape from inside the house as much or more than outside, so map the locations of key windows (and doors) and any permanent features you see from them.

Step 3: Putting places in that plan

The next step is to place your destinations and their connecting paths on your map or scale sketches. As a very rough rule, “garden rooms” get bigger as you get further from the house, and larger properties call for longer paths and larger rooms. Start by cutting out and labeling shapes for each element, then arrange them on the site plan, using removable tape to keep them in place once you have an arrangement you like. [Prefer to draw on a tablet? See “How” below.]

Now, go outside and test your preliminary plan. Measure out the destinations and mark them with flags. Are they too big? Too small? The tendency will be to make them too small and to put them too close together. Walk the paths, noting your views and how comfortable the distances are. Think about how you will plant the “negative space” between them; those parts of your six-acre lawn that are neither grassy destinations nor paths will eventually be planted. Adjust the plan.

Muse. Walk again. Adjust. At some point, you might want to switch from cut-and-tape to sketching in pencil on tracing paper over your survey. Your overall plan will continue to evolve as long as you own the property.

When do the plants come in?

As you rework your overall plan, you’ll be thinking about plantings. Most important is shape and scale: Do you want a tree here as a focal point from the kitchen window? A grouping of tall shrubs there to screen the view of the road? You can also research plants native to your ecoregion and start a spreadsheet with info about your existing plants and those you may want to add. (Fun update: Zoe’s been hard at work with the Wildr team building a tool to help you choose the right native plants and create real backyard habitat. It launches this spring—join the beta waitlist here.)

Once you have a overall plan, pick an area to start planting when the time is right (usually early spring or fall)—then plan again, this time a more detailed plan of plants, hardscaping, and other elements. The process will be iterative, with budget constraints forcing creativity and trying your patience—and, more likely than not, improving the outcome.

—Heather

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Why, How, Wow!

Why?

Just like a floorplan of a house, a landscape plan will give a purpose to every part of a property. In an ecological landscape, areas without a specific use will be planted to benefit wildlife—generally in one of three archetypes: meadow, shrubland, and forest. In the plans for both Hortulus Farm, below, and the small urban yard above, each part of the property has a purpose.

How 

If you have an iPad and Apple Pencil, load your lot map and watch Zoe and my 90-minute workshop, Turn that Patch into a Plan. Or register below for tonight’s workshop with a new process especially for outdoor spaces under 2,000 square feet.

You will find my favorite planning tools useful: a measuring wheel (pictured) and landscape flags. For small spaces or garden rooms, I also recommend graph paper and, if you’re not using an iPad, tracing paper and landscape stencils.

Wow!

Their allée of ‘Heritage’ river birch and ostrich and cinnamon ferns illustrates Renny Reynolds and Jack Staub’s approach to planning to surprise and delight at Hortulus Farm.

What viewsheds did we already possess that might begin to dictate a plan? What sites were ripe for “destination” status, and how would one perceive that one had arrived at such? What focal points might be in the running to herald said arrival? How would the eye be focused and directed, and how would one travel through the gardens? Paths? Steps? Lanes? Bridges? And what of the idea of progression?—Chasing Eden

Related Resources

• Interested in how extraordinary gardens are planned? Read Chasing Eden and Vita Sackville-West's Sissinghurst: The Creation of a Garden (but substitute natives for any planting you admire, natch).

• Need inspiration? Visit private gardens during open days hosted by the Garden Conservancy (ditto re plantings).

• Want to put some intellectual rigor behind designing plant communities? Read Garden Revolution and Planting in a Post-Wild World.

For Paying Subscribers

We have three private webinars coming up soon!

Plan Now for a Small Backyard You’ll Love

TODAY! Tuesday, February 17, 6 pm E.T.
Small yard? Big potential. In this hands-on workshop, Zoe and I will show you how to apply our design approach to small spaces (200 to 2,000 SF). We’ll teach you layout strategies to make balconies and urban outdoor spaces feel larger, function better, and support more wildlife: where to put paths, how to create privacy without blocking light, and how to think about structure and habitat in minimal space. You’ll sketch your own plan and walk away knowing exactly what to do next.

Ditch the AI, Grab a Tablet: Real Garden Design Sketching

Tuesday, March 24, 6 pm E.T.
Tired of those AI garden renders that look completely unhinged? Want to actually see what your design will look like before you dig? In this hands-on workshop, artist and landscape designer Liza Kiesler of Viburnum Gardens will teach you (and Zoe and me) to test your ideas by sketching them onto photographs. Sketching will also improve your attention span, ability to stay focused, and your ability to think outside stereotypes (The Cognitive Benefits of Art). No drawing experience necessary!

Here’s Exactly How to Build Your Wildlife Pond

Tuesday, April 7, 6 pm E.T.
If you’ve always wanted to create a small pond but have been too intimidated to start, this is for you. Wildlife need clean drinking water to survive and many threatened species breed or live in water. Unfortunately, many sources make pond building overly complicated—and less valuable for wildlife. By the time you leave this interview with scientist and author of Building Natural Ponds Robert Pavlis, you’ll be ready to build your wildlife pond—without pumps, filters, or chemicals.

Can’t make the live webinar dates? Recordings will be available for a limited time after the event and will only be shared with people who registered in advance.

To register

Subscribe now to receive registration links to all three webinars.

Subscribe now

Already a paying subscriber? Use the registration links here. (If you can see those links, you’re a paying subscriber.)

Dear Design Your Wild, I just recently learned that I should be pruning young trees as they grow, something I know basically nothing about. Always something new to learn with native plants!

I apologize, dear reader. I replied to your above comment, “There are no shoulds after ‘right plant, right place.’ Those trees do fine in nature without any help.” I was wrong.

First, I neglected to say that watering after transplanting is another “should.” And as I dug into research by structural-pruning legend Edward F. Gilman of the University of Florida, I learned that newly planted trees need more water than I had previously recommended. (New guidelines below.)

All that sun isn’t natural

More relevant to your question, Gilman’s research convinced me that structural pruning of young trees is another should—or at least “worth considering”—for trees destined to be large or to overhang a walkway or seating area. As he points out, the way we plant trees in our landscapes is not natural: Trees in both nurseries and human landscapes are often “open grown”—i.e., spaced so as to give them sunlight all around. In nature, trees generally grow closely together among more established trees, receiving much less sunlight when they are young.

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With the excess sunlight human landscapes provide, trees generate more branches and retain low ones they would naturally shed for lack of sunlight. Some branches receive enough sunlight to develop into a second trunk—called a codominant stem—that competes with the main stem or “leader.” Gilman demonstrated experimentally that removing extra branches and codominant stems make trees more stable during during snow, ice, and wind storms.

Twenty trees were blown using a wind generator up to 45 m/s (110 mph) maintained for 3 min. Each tree was instrumented with three orientation sensors at set heights along the trunk to measure its deflection. Thinning or reducing crowns significantly reduced upper trunk movement at all wind speeds, whereas raising did not. Lower trunk movement was not affected by pruning type.—Arboriculture & Urban Forestry

Valuable to wildlife, costly to humans

Dead trees per se are not an ecological tragedy; they support thousands of species—from woodpeckers to cavity nesters to microscopic fungi—and we need more dead wood in our landscapes to replace these creatures’ lost habitat. However, when large trees fail in human landscapes instead of the wild, we can suffer not only property damage, but the emotional toll of losing an aesthetic feature that the vast majority of us can only afford to replace with a much smaller tree. (The truly tragic—serious injury and death from falling trees—is fortunately exceedingly rare.) Unfortunately, the high cost of arboriculture—driven by its risks, specialized equipment, and insurance costs, as well as the skills involved—provides a motive for professionals to exaggerate these risks (a bias well documented by research, even among doctors).

So, dear reader, you are right. You should probably learn to evaluate and prune your young trees. Then evaluate each tree individually, weighing the benefits of pruning, given its location and eventual size against the potential harm to the tree of creating open wounds and decreasing its photosynthetic capacity. Structural pruning while trees are young is less costly to both you and the tree. Read on for evidence-based structural pruning guidelines.

Wait! I forgot another should: You should plant more trees (learn why). Good luck!

—Heather

P.S. I’d love to hear from readers with hands-on experience pruning young trees! Please comment below.

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P.P.S. Re watering transplanted trees, a grand simplification of Gilman’s research-based recommendations for vigor is to water newly transplanted young trees (trunks under two inches) daily for two weeks, every other day for two months, and weekly until established—which can vary from three months in Miami to 12 months in Minneapolis. See Gilman’s tree irrigation guidelines.

P.P.P.S. Right now is a great time to buy saplings inexpensively through your local conservation district seedling sales. Search for “conservation district” + “seedling sale” + near me. Tree and shrub seedlings don’t experience transplant shock so catch up quickly to nursery grown plants. Install them close to each other—one every two square feet—to encourage rapid growth.

Why, How, Wow!

Why? Reducing future failure without damaging

Codominant stems threaten a tree’s health because bark can become trapped in the joint between them—called “included bark”—acting as a wedge and increasing the likelihood the tree will split. When a mature tree splits, the wound is often so large the tree is unable to recover and eventually dies.

Extra branches and retained lower branches, compared to forest trees, can create attachments and a less aerodynamic structure, also increasing the likelihood of failure during a storm. Vertical branches (less than 45 degree angle to the trunk) and branches that are more than 50 percent the diameter of the trunk have relatively weaker attachments than more horizontal and thinner branches. Low branches around areas where people walk or drive can also be a hazard.

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Balancing the benefits of pruning is the potential to harm the tree. Pruning is wounding, opening the tree, literally, to pathogens. According to plant pathologist Alex L. Shigo’s broadly-accepted CODIT model, trees don’t heal like animals, they compartmentalize. They respond to injury by forming internal boundaries that restrict decay and protect vital tissues. The process of isolating damaged tissue and sealing it off takes energy away from normal growth and development.

If we over prune, trees may respond by sending up thin, fast-growing shoots from their branches, called water sprouts, or their roots, called suckers. Live oaks, crabapples, dogwoods, maples, American hazelnuts, pawpaw, hawthorn, willows, black locusts, and various wild plums are especially susceptible. This can create a perpetual cycle of pruning and regrowth, making gardeners feel needed—and landscapers more profitable—without improving tree health.

How? Pruning is a skill—and an art.

Pruning trees is a skill best learned in a workshop, according to Bram Gunther, former head of forestry for the City of New York and a colleague of my daughter Zoe’s at Plan it Wild. Search “‘structural pruning’ + workshop + near me.” I’m certainly not going to attempt to teach you in this newsletter!

If you prefer to learn online, look for materials from a forest service or university extension program, which are most likely to be evidence-based. Start with the video introduction below from the Kansas Forest Service; it’s the best among many I watched. Before you take pruners to any tree, I recommend you also Google “pruning + [species name] + extension” to find reliable species-specific guidance.

See also the University of Florida’s pruning guide, including sections on timing and frequency—basically, when planting and 2, 4, 8, 14, and 25 years after. When you cannot reach high enough to prune from the ground, it’s time to call in a professional; search for one at the International Society of Arboriculture.

Having fallen down the pruning rabbit hole, how does this affect what I’m going to do in my yard?

• Newly planted 3-foot flatwoods plum: Trim vertical sprouts on stem after flowering (which has already begun); over time, maintain a single leader and remove low branches over driveway.

• Newly planted 6-foot fringe tree: Leave as is. It’s a small, shrub-like, multi-stemmed tree and doesn’t need a single leader.

• 25-foot Florida maple: Use pole saw to cut back (reduce) the smaller of two codominant stems to a lateral branch (up to 50 percent), and repeat in a year or two, if necessary. The codominant stem should subordinate over time. [My husband Pete, who studied trees as a wildlife biologist, says he wouldn’t do anything; maybe I’ll just remove 25 percent of the stem.]

• 75-foot live oak that hangs over our roof: Keep an eye on the fork between two codominant trunks. The swelling and darkened color suggests included bark. 😬[Pete: “It has done just fine for 100 years.”]

Wow! A beautiful tree-filled landscape

Finally, here’s some eye candy to remind you how beautiful tree-filled landscapes can be. Landscape architect Mary Dargan designed this yard at a North Carolina mountain retreat.

When she came on board, Dargan says, “there was nothing but grass and a couple of moth-eaten mountain laurels.” And so she conjured up a plan that wove plenty of function into the greenery—imparting “a feeling of transitional spaces and rooms” screened off by plantings, each terraced section flowing downhill into the next; harmonizing with the river and more than eighty inches of yearly rainfall to “direct, absorb, and enjoy water across the site”; using native plants whenever possible to welcome beneficial insects and songbirds (while including exotic species as needed, especially those like hellebores that deer find distasteful); installing “permeable paving” in the form of local river rock. A decade in, Dargan’s botanical acumen has helped transform the plot into a lush, verdant Southern Appalachian refuge—one that somehow feels like both an extension of the forest and a ferny oasis within it.—Garden & Gun

Upcoming Workshops

Open to Everyone

Yardenalities™: A Design Shortcut for a Backyard Makeover—TUESDAY!
Register for Yardenalities workshop on February 3 @ noon E.T. at Homegrown National Park.

Designing Gardens for Birds
Register for designing gardens for birds workshop on March 8 @ 5 p.m. E.T. at Cornell Lab.

Only for Paying Subscribers

We’re offering three winter webinars to thank paying subscribers for supporting our work and keeping the newsletter free for everyone. Read more about them here.

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Woohoo! Zoe and I are thrilled to announce our new webinar series!

We’ve received rave reviews from thousands of participants in our latest workshops, because we work hard to make them interactive and practical. We’re continuing to apply Zoe’s background in neuroscience and behavioral change, as well as our shared sense of fun, to ensure you’ll come away inspired and with practical ways to improve your yard.

Zoe and I offer most of our webinars in the winter because it’s a great time to plan. Not only is it too cold or snowy to garden in many parts of the country, but you can see the structure of your garden—and how to improve it—more clearly after leaves fall and perennials die back.

In addition to two public workshops coming up with Homegrown National Park and Cornell’s Garden for Birds, we’re offering three exclusive workshops for our premium subscribers:

• February 17 - Plan Now for a Small Backyard You’ll Love: Small yard? Big potential. In this hands-on workshop, Zoe and I will show you how to apply our design approach to small spaces (200 to 2,000 SF). We’ll teach you layout strategies to make balconies and urban outdoor spaces feel larger, function better, and support more wildlife: where to put paths, how to create privacy without blocking light, and how to think about structure and habitat in minimal space. You’ll sketch your own plan and walk away knowing exactly what to do next.

• March 24 - Ditch the AI, Grab a Pencil: Real Garden Design Sketching: Tired of those AI garden renders that look completely unhinged? Want to actually see what your design will look like before you dig? In this hands-on workshop, artist and landscape designer Liza Kiesler of Viburnum Gardens will teach you (and Zoe and me) to test your ideas by sketching them onto photographs on your tablet. Sketching will also improve your attention span, ability to stay focused, and your ability to think outside stereotypes (The Cognitive Benefits of Art). No drawing experience necessary!

• April 7 - Here’s Exactly How to Build Your Wildlife Pond: If you’ve always wanted to create a small pond but have been too intimidated to start, this is for you. Wildlife need clean drinking water to survive and many threatened species breed or live in water. Unfortunately, many sources make pond building overly complicated—and less valuable for wildlife. By the time you leave this interview with scientist and author of Building Natural Ponds Robert Pavlis, you’ll be ready to build your wildlife pond—without pumps, filters, or chemicals.

If you can see the links below, we invite you to register for FREE. (If you’re not yet a premium subscriber, you can upgrade now for $30 per year to receive the registration links. Or, complete the Less Lawn More Life challenge from our partners at Wildr and you’ll receive a comped subscription!)

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Open to Everyone

Yardenalities™: A Design Shortcut for a Backyard Makeover

Tuesday, February 3, 12 pm E.T.

In this interactive workshop, Zoe and I will share how hardscape and native plant choices express each of six Yardenalities™—contemporary garden design styles rooted in major landscape traditions. You’ll discover which style resonates with you and learn how to apply it to create a yard that feels cohesive, exciting, and alive. By the end, you’ll have a clear direction—and the confidence to bring it to life.

Register for Yardenalities workshop on February 3 at Homegrown National Park.

Designing Gardens for Birds

Sunday, March 8, 5 pm E.T.

Ready to turn your yard into a bird paradise? Join Zoe and me for a fun, hands-on design session where we’ll sketch, dream, and plan your perfect bird-friendly garden. We’ll walk you through simple design principles to create outdoor “rooms” that feel good for you and look like a 5-star resort to your feathered neighbors—think cozy pathways, inviting destinations, and the perfect woody plants to bring it all together. You’ll walk away with a first-draft layout for your space and clear next steps to continue to garden for birds.

Register for designing gardens for birds workshop on March 8 at Cornell Lab.

Only for Premium Subscribers

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This week, I’m responding to more questions from participants in my daughter Zoe and my Turn that Patch into a Plan workshop. [free video]

Dear Design Your Wild, A room for you in your front yard: I’m having trouble visualizing a destination in the front of my home—it’s a very standard 1960s neighborhood.

So many options! From an understated bench to a fully-furnished patio. Even a basketball hoop in the driveway makes a destination but, as Charlotte garden designer Jay Sifford says in a recent Instagram reel, I’m a big proponent of seating in the front yard.

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From the mid-19th century through the 1930s, sitting in front of one’s home was commonplace. Houses were usually built with front porches where you could relax, cool off, people-watch, and socialize with neighbors. But as cars became commonplace, developers constructed communities without sidewalks and houses without porches. By the time your house was built in the 1960s, front yards were generally designed to be passed by or through, not used. Although New Urbanist developments like the 1980’s Seaside (Remember The Truman Show?) bucked this trend, most new homes are still built without functional front yards.

Fortunately, you don’t need a porch to enjoy seating in your front yard. In fact, “social front yards” became a trend during the pandemic, according to Kevin Lenhart, ​​landscape architect and design director at Yardzen.

“People were getting cabin fever in their houses during quarantine,” Lenhart says, and “this put a lot of pressure on backyards, so naturally, some of it overflowed into the front yard. People were craving interaction and wanted to talk to new people without going to public spaces, and front yards became a safe semi-neutral territory for neighbors to interact.”—Food52 (with Lenhart’s how-to tips)

More recently, the New York Times wrote about how Houston residents are socializing with neighbors in their transformed, street-facing garages and proclaimed “The Garage Is the New Front Porch” [gift link].

But even if you’re not social, go ahead and put a chair or bench in your front yard. Research shows that putting a chair or bench along a path creates a sense of comfort, even if you never use it. And, especially amid today’s rash of incivility, why not signal a friendly willingness to interact, even when you’re not feeling social?

(No, cavemen and dinosaurs never coexisted, but the sense of security you get from enveloping seating in tall greenery is still a good idea.)

Dear Design Your Wild, A good portion of my side yard is a septic leech field. What to do on/around this?

A septic field is a great place for a meadow, because the deeper-rooted grasses and wildflowers improve the soil’s ability to absorb wastewater and filter contaminants. Ideally, run your path around the field, not over it, because foot traffic has the reverse effect—and everyone needs a path circling their house, when at all possible. In fact, now is a good time to seed a meadow with a septic safe mix like this one from Prairie Moon. Do not plant shrubs or trees over the septic field, because their woody roots may damage the lines; woody plants with water-seeking roots (like willows) should be kept far from the drainfield.

Dear Design Your Wild, I have a big stump in this design [from the workshop]. Any tips?

First, go you for keeping the stump! We need more dead wood in our landscapes. My top recommendation for your stump is to treat it as a planter, preferably surrounded by more vegetation. Many stumps have natural depressions you can plant right into, but you can hollow out a large stump to make a deeper planter, if you like. For more on the ecological value of dead wood and how to make it attractive, see Wait! B4 You Cut Down That Tree.

Why, How, Wow!

Why?

First, the bad news: According to the “environmental mismatch hypothesis,” posited in a recent journal article, the environment we’ve created may threaten the viability of our species. Ouch.

A growing body of observational and experimental evidence suggests that industrialisation negatively impacts key biological functions essential for survival and reproduction and, therefore, evolutionary fitness. Specifically, environmental contamination arising directly from industrial activities (e.g. air, noise and light pollution, microplastic accumulation) is linked to impaired reproductive, immune, cognitive and physical function. Chronic activation of the stress response systems, which further impairs these biological functions, also appears more pronounced in industrialised areas.—Biological Reviews

How

The good news: OK, I can’t really address that crushing hypothesis. However, it certainly suggests protecting and engaging with the natural world we evolved for—as you and I are doing—has widespread benefits. That’s true at the macro level, where 190+ countries have committed to conserve at least 30 percent of their terrestrial, inland water, and coastal and marine areas by 2030. (Notably, the United States is not among them.)

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And it’s true on the micro level: There’s scads of hard evidence that each of us can improve our physical and mental health by connecting more with nature, as Dr. Kathy Willis documents in her new book Good Nature: Why Seeing, Smelling, Hearing and Touching Plants Is Good for Our Health. I’ll share more from the book another time, but for now I want to leave you with some simple changes Willis told Joe Gardener she’s making in her life:

1. Extending time in nature, walking or sitting, to 20 minutes or more.

2. Focusing on greenery; flowers are less important.

3. Gardening without gloves.

4. Touching plants.

5. Growing spider plants indoors.

6. Diffusing natural scents inside, too.

7. Making her screensaver a nature scene.

Did any of these surprise you? They surprised me—and I’m making changes. For the evidence behind these recommendations, read Willis’s book or watch the podcast. One example: A spider plant completely transforms the microbiome in a closed room.

Wow!

Seattle-based landscape designer and educator Stacie Crooks transformed a typical post-World War II front yard into a wildlife-friendly garden with seating and mostly native plants.

Using two-thirds evergreen plant material ensures that there will be plenty of interest and garden coverage throughout each season. We carefully chose a plant color palette that complements the house color and intentionally incorporated red and burgundy plants to connect the eye to the red front door.—Fine Gardening

Miscellany

• I’ve started borrowing ebooks for my Kindle, including Willis’, from the library. Ebooks don’t contribute anthropogenic mass and libraries compensate writers especially well for ebooks.

• The Supreme Court has agreed to hear Bayer’s case that federal pesticide labeling protects them against the thousands of cancer claims from Roundup users. Stay tuned. [CNN]

• This year’s winner of the “green Nobel Prize” studies lowly fungi. Learn why in her interview in the New York Times. [gift link]

• You can see my and others’ resolutions in Laura Fenton’s Garden Pros Share the 10 Ways They’re Changing Their Landscapes in 2026

Yes, I’m celebrating YOU, because YOU, my dear subscriber, are an ecological success story. By eschewing pesticides and adopting ecological landscaping principles, you are supporting biodiversity in your yard. And by doing so, you’re also improving your and your family’s health. And you’re inspiring others around you. Go, you!

As you start to think about how you’ll continue to transform your yard in 2026—because yardening is a process, right?—here is recent research to remind you why you’re such a biodiversity superstar:

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Thousands of arthropods

Wherever you left leaves in the fall, thousands of insects will emerge in the spring—about twice as many in number and many more species than if you’d removed those leaves.

In fact, Maryland state entomologist Max Ferlauto and colleagues found that almost twice as many butterfly and moth species emerged from test areas where they left leaves in suburban yards compared to where they removed them.

“In a square meter of yard where you leave your leaves, there’s on average almost 2,000 insects that will emerge over the course of the spring,” [Ferlauto told Margaret Roach of the New York Times].

That total number doesn’t include decomposers and detritivores like earthworms or millipedes, he said, nor the tiny insectlike soil animals called springtails. What it does include are arboreal arthropods—species that spend only a portion of their lives in the fallen leaves and the rest above ground: butterflies and moths (about 20 will emerge), parasitic wasps (about 300), beetles (almost 400), more than 100 spiders and 1,000-plus flies of various kinds. …

“When you remove the leaves, instead of retaining them,” Dr. Ferlauto said, “you reduce the number of moths by 45 percent, the number of spiders by 56 percent on average, the average number of beetles by 24 percent.”

Besides those declines in abundance—the total number of individuals—there was also a reduction in species richness, the diversity within each group. In butterflies and moths, for example, that fell by 44 percent.—The New York Times [gift link]

Small areas, big impact

Think your garden is too small or your neighborhood is too urban to support wildlife? Think again. In the year and a half since ecologists replaced non-native plants with native goldenrod, columbine, aster, and sedge in a tenth-acre plot in the middle of New York City’s Broadway—a busy boulevard in the densest city in the country—citizen scientists have so far documented 127 plant and animal species on iNaturalist.

…which reminds me to make a resolution for 2026:

1. Document my yard’s insect biodiversity. Want to join me? To track plants and animals, including insects, take a picture and ID it with the iNaturalist app, which will identify it and track its geolocation. (Download from Apple or Google.)

Read on for my other resolutions…

“Traditional” gardens can be biodiversity hotspots

If you’re a longtime gardener and love your daffodils and peonies, I celebrate you! And if you’re a newby who yearns to grow roses in honor of your grandfather, go for it!

Biodiversity studies of gardens cultivated for beauty first, like England’s Great Dixter and Pennsylvania’s Chanticleer, have demonstrated the ecological value of their mixes of thousands of exotic and native plant species. Chanticleer’s study documented 1,157 animal species, including an unnamed species of crayfish, a bee species never before found in Pennsylvania, and 23 bird species rated of greatest conservation need in the state. Demonstrating the unique role of gardens compared to wild places, Chanticleer’s 509 moth species include many forest understory specialists that are less common in the wild as a result of invasive plants and deer browse.

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Personally, I have become less doctrinaire since reviewing these results. So here’s my second resolution:

2. Loosen up. Have fun incorporating more plants native elsewhere in the country, as well as non-invasive exotic plants, into my new garden. I will still aim for more than “two thirds for the birds”—i.e., two thirds locally native vegetation to support breeding pairs, per Doug Tallamy—but one third is a lot, and increases as I add more natives. (If you’d like to see if a favorite exotic plant is invasive, check the lists at the Invasive Plant Atlas of the United States.)

The Chanticleer example, as well as research like Maryland’s leave-the-leaves study, underscores the importance of landscaping practices to biodiversity. Here is Chanticleer’s list of what makes a biodiverse garden; you can learn more from their biodiversity study.

1. Grow a diversity of woody plants.

2. Grow a diversity of herbaceous plants.

3. Provide soft-pithed plants for cavity nesters.

4. Provide logs, snags, and sticks.

5. Leave the leaf litter.

6. Limit pesticides.

7. Reduce outdoor lighting.

Differing tastes boost biodiversity

Maybe you’ve stopped irrigating and using pesticides and planted a few native shrubs, but you still love your lawn. I celebrate you! As English garden designer and biodiversity advocate John Little pointed out in a recent Plantastic podcast, taste creates edges and complexity and hence more biodiversity in urban and suburban areas.

So if you’ve got one garden where … a bloke wants to cut the whole thing to lawn—because you usually have a bloke who loves cutting lawn—that’s OK, because next door may well have longer grass or an herbaceous area, and the next garden might have more shrubs. … That is why gardens are so good [for biodiversity], because they are complex, because they are driven by people’s taste.—Plantastic Podcast with Dr. Jared

(If you’d like help making your yard more biodiverse while expressing your personal taste, plan to join my daughter Zoe’s and my “yardenality” workshop on Tuesday, February 3, at 11 am Eastern time, hosted by Homegrown National Park! Registration details to come.)

Resolutions and webinars

OK, I admit, I don’t really make resolutions, but I’m big on planning. I’m constantly thinking ahead and making lists about what I’m going to do in the garden. And the dawn of a new year, when there’s less going on in my yard and the cold keeps me inside (even in north Florida), is my favorite time to plan. So here are the other major changes I’m going to make this year:

3. Build ponds, starting with two in Gainesville. They are so important to biodiversity and they are the “wow” factor in the backyard design Zoe sketched when she visited. I’ve already ordered all the supplies and Pete and I will start digging this month. Stay tuned.

4. Plant a microforest. Zoe’s colleagues at Plan it Wild, leaders in creating microforests, tell me I only need a five-by-eight area. I’m going to lean on them to teach me—and you, too.

5. Learn evidence-based pruning. So far, most everything I can find about pruning is based on tradition, not research. But I’m on the trail of a scientist who has actually done studies…. I want to know: Which pruning actually impacts plant health? And, even if pruning is just about aesthetics, what are the best methods for which plants?

6. Spend smarter. Seed more. Propagate from cuttings. Invest in high impact features (like the ponds). Be patient: Wait to see which of the 40 new plant species in our new Gainesville yard thrive before planting more. And that’s hard for me….

What are YOUR plans for your yard this year? Please tell me in a comment. And also let me know if you’d be interested in a webinar or workshop on any of the topics I’m focusing on. Zoe and I will be soon be announcing our winter webinar series.

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Wishing you health and happiness in 2026,

—Heather

P.S. To see “before” pics and learn more about how Lu La Studio transformed a parking lot into the gorgeous garden above, read Laura Fenton’s Gardenista article.

My daughter Zoe and my latest yard design workshop, hosted by Wild Ones last week, was a wild ride! If you’re not one of the thousands who joined live—yes, it was nerve-wrackingly popular—you can watch the recording here. This week, I’m going to start answering the many questions participants wrote in the chat. But first, a timely question from a longtime subscriber:

Dear Heather, Could you tell us about winter sowing? I bought some wonderful plains oval sedge seeds. Initially I used pots, but the line I am making is so long I’ll go broke. Prairie Moon thought winter sowing would work and now it’s beginning to be winter and I am wondering how to begin. So I bought about 3 oz to give it a try. What can you teach me?—Marsha, Kansas

Is that a trick question, Marsha? I ask because, as an experienced ecological landscaper, you must know that sedges are notoriously difficult to grow from seed. But I’ll roll with it, because growing from seed is by far the most cost effective way to grow native plants—and now is indeed the time to do it.

Please read my comprehensive guide to direct seeding, Have You Ordered Your Seeds Yet? However, I have to warn you that growing from seed is always something of a crap shoot, no matter which method you use. With the pot method you mention, I get tons of seedlings, but then lose most of them either over the summer or after transplanting into the ground in fall. With direct sowing, some species come in too plentifully—I’m talking about you, blue vervain—while others, zilch.

Here’s the super-lazy method I’m personally using this year, just before a rain, when feasible:

• In bare soil: I scratch it up a bit and then cast seeds onto it, at a much higher rate per square foot than recommended. Done.

• In turf or among native plants: I get down on my hands and knees, find a patch of soil between the existing plants, scratch the soil a bit if it’s compacted, press a bunch of seeds into the area (also more than recommended), move to the next area and repeat. Done.

Fingers crossed!

—Heather

P.S. Reader, which native plant species have you grown successfully by direct seeding? Please share species and tips in the comments, below.

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Snappy answers to workshop chat questions

My house is a colonial—thoughts on leaning into the linearity vs. softening when making paths and borders?

Personally, I would lean into the linearity of your colonial home with straight paths, letting your plants do the softening as they explode over the edges in what we call the Blooming Romantic yardenality. But naturalistic paths in the A Walk in the Park yardenality would work well, too. At Mt. Cuba Center in Delaware, the style is linear and symmetric close to the house and more naturalistic further away, a traditional approach captured by the phrase “the garden curtsies to the house.” Learn more in Design Shortcut to a Backyard Makeover: Yardenalities 2.0.

Hard to put a destination in a 20’ x 25’ garden.

Do you think destination means a resort? Any seating area, even a single chair, is a destination. Your garden is the size of a large living room! Even if you plant three sides to soften the edges, as we recommend, you’ll still have enough room for at least two seating areas—for example, a fourtop with chairs in one area and a couple of Adirondack chairs in another. Separate these seating areas with plants, including one or several shrubs or multistem trees. Learn more in How to Make Small Awesome.

Hey, dumb question—if my backyard is only 120 ft deep by 50 ft wide, can I really have small paths? Or maybe just destination areas?

Not dumb, maybe semantics? Perhaps we should be saying “rooms, doorways, and halls” rather than “paths and destinations.” Your 6,000 square foot property is the size of a huge house with many rooms, doorways, and halls. Remember, plants are your walls. Two shrubs or small, multistem trees on either side of an opening makes a doorway. A three-foot strip of lawn between perennial beds is a hallway—and you certainly have room for such a path. Look at the Wild Ones sample garden designs for ideas; they are generally about the size of your yard.

Back of our house we have a steep hill going down to the pool. It is all lawn and people have a hard time walking it. Can’t have any “rooms” there. I don’t know what to do?

Cut stairs into the turf, with railroad tie or cobblestone risers, to give people easy access to the pool below. You can DIY this! To lessen the slope, zigzag the stairway down the hill. Then plant natives into the turf on either side—a perfect place for tall plants, because no one’s walking there anyway. A seating area overlooking the pool on a “landing” halfway down would be nice, but you may need a landscaper to create a terrace ten feet deep or so. In any case, your pool is a fabulous destination.

I have 2 acres with lots of invasive plants. Any tips for removing and cleaning the yard as a do-it-yourselfer?

The counterintuitive, science-backed approach to tackling invasives is to tackle areas with the fewest invasives first, cutting or pulling them until they are under control, then work from pristine to less pristine. This is one of those chores that are worth outsourcing to an ecological landscaping crew, if you can afford it, asking them to teach you to identify the most prevalent ones so you can remove them when they reappear, as they inevitably will. Read The Latest on Weeds. If you have large areas with invasives, also read Solutions for Invasives.

What about deer?

Dear, dear deer! We protect all our young shrubs and trees with temporary fencing, removing it and spraying them with naturally minty Deer Out in summer. For more ideas, read Keep Your Plants Safe 🦌 and Advice About Deer Fences.

How to deter ticks?

Seed an anti-tick border of native mints around your main seating area or pathways. Monardas and mountain mints are some of our most prolific and beautiful native wildflowers, so it’s a win-win. Read about why this works and other research-based tactics in How to Protect Yourself from Lyme Disease If You Love Wildlife.

Wow!

Lisa Doseff, a participant in our workshop last week, recognized her own garden—and granddaughter—in our presentation. Zoe and I adore the image of the joyful girl in a naturalistic play area, don’t you?

It turns out, Lisa wrote an award-winning picture book about creating that garden with her granddaughter, called Grandma Lisa’s Humming, Buzzing, Chirping Garden. A last-minute stocking stuffer for the child in your life?

And, lastly…

• I love to share articles on ecological landscaping on mainstream sites, hoping to encourage the editors to publish more, as well as for your benefit. Unfortunately, mainstream content about native plants often contain misinformation and—especially—misidentified images, as a sharp reader noticed in the article on propagating from cuttings that I shared in the last newsletter. My bad for not catching it!

• ICYMI, a seminal journal article that found glysophate safe has been recalled.

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Good news: You’re both right! It’s a matter of degree. You are correct that the light leaf cover in the foreground of your photo—20 percent or less—will break down and feed the lawn (if they don’t blow off first). D. is correct that the heavier leaf cover toward the trees may damage the turf.

Have you considered planting native flowering shrubs among and in front of the trees? If so, consider leaving a layer of six to eight inches of leaves to kill the turf and prepare for spring planting. You can research shrubs with Native Plant Trust’s Plant Finder. Shrubs will add beauty and a greater sense of enclosure (blocking the view of your fence and the neighbor’s house) while reducing the amount of raking necessary next year. Native plants, unlike turf, benefit from up to six inches of dead leaves, which also provide winter habit for beneficial insects.

I’m curious why you’re removing the pine needles. It’s a myth that they make the soil more acidic (learn why). Pine needles and other evergreen leaves do take longer to break down than deciduous leaves, so thick layers of them deter growth, making them useful for paths and mulch. (Read more on leaving leaves in my article, Mulch Ado About Mulch.)

—Heather

P.S. I appreciate the increasing number of comments on my posts. I love your ideas, feedback, and questions.

Why, How, Wow!

Why?

As you know, I’m a HUGE fan of making a habit of strolling around the yard daily—or, if you work at home, as I do—multiple times each day. We’re all less likely to go outside when it’s cold and the flora and wildlife are less interesting, but recent research found people benefit from walking in nature even when they don’t enjoy it. So, just do it!

In our studies, people who took 50-minute walks in nature showed about a 20 percent improvement in working memory compared to walks in busy urban areas. Even viewing photos or listening to nature sounds for 10 minutes helps, though not as much as the real thing.

Interestingly, enjoyment isn’t required. People who walked in a cold Michigan winter, and didn’t like it at all, still showed the same cognitive boost as those who walked on a warm summer day.—Marc Berman (author, Nature and the Mind) in Psychology Today

To continue to engage with nature—and reap the cognitive benefits—in winter when there’s less going on, double down on mindfulness exercises during your daily strolls. For example, learn to ID trees from their bark. (Here’s an eight-minute video introduction to bark identification. Who knew?!)

How

Here are more thoughts on staying engaged with your garden through the winter:

1. Relax. Enjoy the downtime. In general, ignore old agricultural adages like “They won’t thrive if you don’t strive,” as well as contemporary articles like “How to Winterize Coneflowers in 5 Simple Steps.” Nature doesn’t winterize coneflowers and neither should you. It’s not that complicated.

2. Direct sow seeds if you must do something. For how, see Have You Ordered Your Seeds Yet? You can also propagate native shrubs from cuttings (here’s how); if you’re experiment fails, you’ve only lost a few twigs. Seed inspiration: the plants Piet Oudolf used in the Nantucket garden below; rare seed sources for California and the Mountain West; for pastures, native forage mix like this one from Roundstone.

   

3. Plan (aka, dream). Planning is fun and reassuring for some, anxiety-producing for others. Whatever your response to planning, I recommend you devote 90 minutes next week to my daughter Zoe and my free workshop for Wild Ones on creating a master layout (register here). If you start now, you’ll have plenty of time to dream about your overall layout, identify what you’ll tackle next year, and complete your plant research in time for spring. That’s what our former student Rosa did and she’s loving her yard a year later:

My garden exploded this year! I’ve added a few fern varieties in my backyard, a pawpaw tree, a second spicebush, and recently installed a hammock (bliss!). I am in awe of the amount of bees and other insects that are enjoying my plantings. I call it Bee TV! I’ve had a few great conversations with neighbors about it and I’ve inspired some to plant more natives!—Rosa, Greenwich, CT

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4. Improve your seating. Adding seating instantly adds a sense of comfort and a place to go in your yard, among the very top attributes of a restorative landscape. If you have carpentry skills, consider making Adirondack chairs (plan) or Dan Benarcik’s modernist version. If you’re a sewer, you can make throw pillows for your seating. I recently bought a fabulous outdoor fabric from Quadrille’s discount outlet (25 percent off with code CYBER-25). I also like the prints from the Blockshop x Sunbrella collab. In Veranda’s new book, garden designer Scott Shrader of Los Angeles says,

It’s my job to get people out into the garden and keep them there. … I am always looking for a new arrangement to engage people and give them something to do, even if it’s simply spending time together.—Veranda Enchanting Gardens: Inspired Landscape Design

5. Learn something new. Check out webinars from your local native plant society or botanical garden (find both here). If you haven’t already, get ready for spring by completing the 12-week Less Lawn More Life challenge, which you can now begin at any time. Even experienced ecological landscapers like Rosa find it helpful.

I’ve been following the Less Lawn More Life updates all summer, super cool work!—Rosa, Greenwich, CT

Wow!

My friend—and designer extraordinaire—Jonathan Hansen took seriously Zoe and my advice to create destinations to draw him and his family and friends into their woods. He designed and built an awesome bridge across a creek from trees felled on his property. As he wrote on Instagram,

Some projects take a year of planning, a few weeks of felling trees, and a lifetime of dreaming.—Jonathan Hansen

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Miscellany

Looking for gifts for fellow nature lovers? Check out Laura Fenton’s lists of recent books about low impact gardening and stocking stuffer guide for gardeners. (To anyone in my family who has read this far: I’d love the tool cleaner—and a sharpening stone to go with it:)