Your Natural Garden: A Practical Guide to Caring for an Ecologically Vibrant Home Garden by Kelly D. Norris

As featured in The New York Times, a valuable and artfully crafted guide to tending a naturalistic garden. From plantsman Kelly Norris, author of New Naturalism, comes a much-needed handbook to maintaining today’s natural gardens. Naturalistic plantings, overflowing with biodiverse communities of plants, are filling front and backyards around the globe with colorful blooms, easy-care plants, and wildlife habitat. But caring for a naturalistic garden is vastly different than caring for a traditional home landscape of carefully manicured plants separated by mulch and regularly primped and pruned. In Your Natural Garden, tending your garden properly means understanding its connection to the greater natural world and using garden care methods that mimic nature instead of controlling it. Page by page, you’re guided through all the seasons of a naturalistic garden’s life and the tasks and to-dos that come with each of them. Including how to: Encourage and establish complexity in a new garden Promote growth and variation by letting your plants self propagate Read more

From the Publisher Natural gardens offer a steady dopamine drip, a daily cascade of pleasure, satisfaction, motivation, and reward for being consciously part of something, whether you can name every creature that walks through your garden or not. The timing for starting the garden again varies widely with weather and geography. Watch the landscape for cues and be conscious of how much disturbance you introduce. How to Know a Plant Understanding a plant goes beyond aesthetics; it requires understanding its dynamic role in your natural garden. Most gardeners learn about plants like they would speed date, asking a few questions and taking a few answers to decide whether they should grow it. What if we approached learning about plants with a deeper curiosity about how they live? A Gardener is a Keystone Species The act of planting is uniquely human. Planting has evolved as a human behavior, first for sustenance, then for pleasure and contemplation, and now as an intentional way of engaging the environment. Ironically, when defined by acts of planting, gardens can exist without gardening by a human player, even if they slowly become unrecognizable as such to most other humans A Natural Garden is a Complex System Holistic, cyclical, dynamic. Any ecologically attuned gardener tosses around these words fluently—the garden isn’t separate from the world around it. Complex systems are greater than the sum of their parts. Understanding the natural garden as a complex system requires knowing more than how individual plant species grow. You have to understand how they interact with their environment.