In travel and gardens alike, I live for the unexpected. That mysterious bend in the path leading to a whole other something you could never imagine in advance.
Like a portal to another world.
My latest trip to Europe was filled with twists and turns in a month-long journey that skipped through seven different countries.
It’s about setting aside our desire for control to instead work in partnership with nature. This is essentially the guiding principle behind the naturalistic garden, a plant-driven approach to landscape design that has been around in one form or another since Englishman William Robinson first published his first edition of The Wild Garden in 1870.
But now with signature projects like the High Line in New York City and Chicago’s Lurie Garden, a growing global movement in planting design has found a bolder, modernist expression of this ideal with a collective dream to re-wild our nature-deprived urban worlds.
A new movement of native planting advocates is showing us how we can help sustain the matrix of biodiversity upon which all life depends – including our own.
To delve deeper, I spoke with Toronto ecological designer and former wild plant nursery owner Charles Kinsley to learn how urban gardeners can create and sustain a native garden.
