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.
There comes a moment in every voyage when you know you’ve arrived. And that’s how I felt on my first-ever visit to the private dream garden of Piet and Anja Oudolf on ‘Grass Days’, one Saturday morning in early September 2009.
Click on the magic box below to transport yourself to the Netherlands and meet Piet in conversation in his home garden at Hummelo. I cannot recommend this excellent video highly enough. Dutch Profiles: Piet Oudolf from Dutch Profiles on Vimeo.
Seeing the New Perennial planting at the Toronto Botanical Garden for the first time was like discovering a Rosetta stone of modern garden design. The day I saw it, the Entry Garden Walk had been newly planted and the perennial beds looked like an immense puzzle, with each plant poking up its head like a clue.
I’m raising the curtain on something of a secret world.
It’s where for the past decade and more, I’ve immersed myself from early spring until late fall in the making of a different kind of garden. Mine is a naturalistic garden – designed to emulate something of the spirit and feeling of nature itself. And in many ways, the plantings look as if they have simply materialized over time.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
