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Results for Naturalistic Design

Trees for the Future

The best time to plant a tree will be right after you watch this talk.

Catch up on the latest thinking in tree selection for climate resilience, carbon storage, boosting biodiversity, and other essential ecosystem benefits. Not to mention for the life-giving beauty, scale and character that trees bring to our gardens and landscapes – but only if we plant the right tree in the right place.

My special guests are international tree expert Henrik Sjöman from Sweden and Arit Anderson, UK garden designer, passionate advocate for the environment and presenter on BBC Gardeners’ World. And they are here to help us think very big indeed.

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Piet Oudolf At Work: A Conversation

Right from its plain brown-wrap cover, the new book ‘Piet Oudolf At Work’ strikes a different chord in how it chooses to show and tell its story.

Oudolf has always been a visual thinker and his creative process is both far more abstract, complex and subtle than can easily be described in words. So instead of verbiage, At Work visually walks us through each phase of the design process, as the landscapes he envisions in his mind make the creative leap to colour-coded plans on paper.

This is his first book to delve into such depth, openly sharing plans from nearly 30 projects in the largest collection of his drawings ever published.

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Let’s Build Wildlife Habitat into Everyday Places Everywhere

Where others see trash in an industrial wasteland, John Little sees the raw materials to create startlingly effective ecological habitat.

For 25 years now, this English innovator has worked to recycle, reclaim and repurpose the stuff we throw away into artful ecological structures.

He takes a mix of crushed highway rubble, rusted out old cars, smashed bathroom tiles together with handfuls of wildflower seeds, and rejigs all the broken pieces to fit just about any niche in the urban jungle. Everything from green roofs and habitat walls to bus shelters and buzzy meadow landscapes.

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Wildscape Update: New Talks

When I first posted my idea for Wildscaping here in spring 2019, it was with the secret hope that both the word and its spirit might take on a life of its own.

Like a message in a digital bottle.

We all know what happened next. Driven by the pandemic lockdowns, we experienced a seismic cultural shift to suddenly embrace all things plants, gardens, and matters of biodiversity in ways no-one could have ever predicted or imagined.

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The Wildscaping Talk: Explorations in Naturalistic Planting Design

I’m ecstatic to present my latest talk focused on the wilder frontiers of designed landscapes.

We delivered the talk live to an international audience of gardeners and designers in early April. If you missed it, no worries. You can now watch the recording as a Video-on-Demand on Vimeo simply by clicking this link.

I’ve been evolving and delivering versions of this talk to garden lovers over the past two years – and getting rave reviews along the way. It’s an opportunity to share my inside perspective on some of the international designers, gardens and innovations leading this growing movement. I pair this up with a look at my own experimental design projects at my cabin here in Canada.

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