On Garden Design
or, what's my job again?
If you don’t end up reading to the bottom of this missive here is the TL;DR: I have a website for my garden design work! You can check it out at www.tenderthicketsgardendesign.com. Many more offerings are being cooked up, but for now if you live in the Midwest you can find a little DIY how-to guide for planting your own native pollinator plant patch there, as well as my contact info if you’re interested in a bespoke design for your yard or garden. <3
First, some notes on the year anniversary of this newsletter
I wanted this newsletter to be a place where I could write about anything I wanted - I didn’t want to be tied to one subject, or even just a few subjects. One year into this experiment in writing publicly and I still feel a little squirrelly about my future self - always the fear that I think haunts many writers: what if someday I just…run out of things to say? Shouldn’t I hoard all my little thoughts for something…big?
My own experience has so far shown this to not be the case, however - in fact it’s quite the opposite. The more I write the more I seem to have to say, the more things I think of that I want to talk about, that I hope will be of interest of all of y’all - a group of people known and unknown to me, delightfully. Whether you support financially or not, your continued attention is deeply appreciated.
I want to take a quick moment here to say a deep, heartfelt thank you to everyone who has subscribed so far - with an especial overflowing of gratitude to the paying subscribers, beautiful angels. It means so much to me to be supported in this way, the belief in my writing - my work - that belies your contributions.
So going into year two I’m cooking up some paid subscriber benefits. My new year’s resolution is to write and publish zines this year - a few of them have been kicking around my head for a while and this year I am making them a reality. I’m not sure how many I will actually produce, but one is already in the throes of being birthed. Paid subscribers will receive a free copy of every zine I publish, sent by snail mail and/or PDF.
It does strike me as funny how little garden design, my actual job, has come up here, though, and I thought it might be worthwhile to talk a little bit about what it is I do and the ideas, philosophies, and experiences that have gotten me to the particular mindset that informs that work.
So what do you actually do?
When I am working, I am working from an imaginative space that comes from many years of deep, detailed noticing the natural world. Take a core sample of the times the breath has been knocked out of me by the particular arching seed head of wild rye, or the first pears burnishing towards ripe on the fruit tree in my yard. When I am working I am filling in the empty spaces with flowers that glitter with dew on spring mornings. I am imagining a friend coming home from work and being struck with awe, stopped in their tracks, by the way the waning light hits the bright flowering currant bush in their front yard. I am seeing the ways that plants - specifically being in relationship with plants, our continued attention; tending, harvesting, appreciation, and so on - can expand our experience of being human in this world peopled with so many different kinds of beings.
One of the things that feels urgent to me about this work is what I perceive to be a lack of access to information about growing plants, and why it’s important to do that in a specific way. In the last few years there has been a lot of strong internet messaging about the necessity of a few things: growing native plants, reducing or getting rid of your lawn completely, leaving the leaves, no mow May, etc. People will absolutely yell at each other on the internet about these things, completely in slogans. This messaging comes from a good place, but it often lacks the nuance of understanding that will make the execution actually effective.
Let’s take No Mow May, for starters. The idea is well-intentioned. The theory is that if you don’t mow your lawn at the start of the growing season you’re giving plants time to bloom (instead of being preemptively decapitated by your John Deere) and therefore giving pollinators a chance to feed on them, helping to fill in the gaps before the flower blooming season really gets into full swing. However, if your lawn is - as most American lawns are - a monoculture of one type of grass which does not bloom, then letting it grow for thirty days does nothing, actually. What would be more helpful is decreasing the amount of grass you have and increasing the variety of native plants so that you have flowers blooming from April through October.
Then there’s the dictum to Plant Native. Planting native plants instead of ornamentals from other parts of the world is the right thing to do, full stop. However, the focus of native flower plantings is often just one charismatic species: the monarch butterfly. And I love monarchs - we should be collectively working to reverse their precipitous decline - but there are many, many other species who are experiencing similarly plummeting populations. The web of life is interwoven - species all the way up and down the food chain depend on each other in innumerable and often unseen ways. The best way to foster this web and keep it from unraveling any further is not just to plant a few native plants that benefit a couple species; but to strive for as much biodiversity as possible in the space available.
Additionally, one of the biggest barriers that we have to turning the suburban yards of America into oases of native biodiversity en masse is the vise-grip that European gardens have on the American psyche. The problem is what we have been trained to think is beautiful, which is deeply ingrained. Much has been written of the invention of the green manicured lawn by the royals of Versailles (including by me), but I think the English garden is an even bigger culprit. European roses, hostas, peonies, hydrangeas - they are everywhere in people’s yards to the point of feeling standard. I agree that they are pretty, but we also need to start seeing the beauty in the plants that are right in front of us - the plants which have evolved for eons to live where we live.
But people don’t know these plants, don’t recognize what they’re seeing, so it all just kind of blurs together. “Plant blindness” is the term for it. It’s a real thing: the average American child can correctly name a thousand corporate logos but can’t identify 10 plants that grow where they live. So then it seems the problem isn’t that people don’t think these plants are beautiful, if given the chance to know them, they just literally don’t know they exist. It’s a form of species loneliness. This is something that I am hoping to help change through this work, in my own small way.
But who the hell has time for all this?? Learning the plants and what they need and where they grow and their many idiosyncrasies. There is a ton of information out there but much of it is conflicting and it can be overwhelming to sift through. So: me, that’s where I come in. I have spent the last fifteen years now learning about plants, helping them grow, seeing firsthand what works and what doesn’t work in different contexts. Here are a few of the ways I’ve come to this kind of job over the last fifteen years:
Trial-and-error gardens in the yards of rentals in Portland, Oregon, in Atlanta, in Iowa City
Three growing seasons as a field hand on a 20-acre organic vegetable farm
Volunteering / WWOOFing on farms (which I have written about previously, LINK), on food justice projects like Solidarity Gardens (LINK), and for the Champaign County Forest Preserves
Earning my Permaculture Design Certification after a six-month course from Shades of Green Permaculture Design in 2019 (although my education is not limited to one single philosophy or school of thought, and it is constantly being updated as I learn more)
An avid hiker and forager, occasional backpacker with an obsession with learning the names of all the plants that grow around me wherever I happen to be hiking or backpacking or foraging, watching the ways they interact with each other in the wild
Continuing my education over the years through classes like Biomimicry: Whole Systems Planning Using Nature's Design through Homestead ATL (RIP!), Tree Care Workshop through Allerton Park, the Future of Food Forests through the Savanna Institute, Designing Forest Gardens with Dave Jacke (who wrote the seminal Edible Forest Gardens texts) through Trees Atlanta. I love to take classes on an ongoing basis because it’s a chance to really nerd out with people who know a lot more than me.
The four years I have spent designing, planting, stewarding, and rewilding my own three acres here in central Illinois. From a blank slate of just nothin’ but lawn, dotted with a couple mature trees when we moved here in 2019, now there is a budding food forest of hazelnuts, serviceberries, gooseberries, blueberries, American plums, pear, native roses, and paw paw. Patches of native pollinator plants bring color and buzzing to the in-between spaces. The best asparagus you’ve ever tasted in your life comes up every spring in a patch that surrounds the four sizable garden beds where I grow as many vegetables as I possibly can. And the outer acre, furthest from the house, all along the edge of our property where the lawn met the cornfield we’ve been rewilding - a delicate balance of letting the native plants in the seed bank come up as they’re wont to, planting natives that are well-suited for the site conditions, and cutting back invasive plants that will crowd everyone else out if given the chance. I have been extremely privileged to have had this opportunity, and I cannot overstate how much I’ve learned from it on a practical level (I wrote about it at length in this newsletter).
The last year designing yards and gardens around the country professionally, getting to see them in action and talk to actual people about how to make them work for their busy lives and their growing spaces of every size
That’s probably not all of it but that’s everything I can think of right now. You can check out the new website at www.tenderthicketsgardendesign.com if it’s something you’re interested in - please don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any questions for me.
Thanks for reading and see ya next time.
<3, Mere