The Wildscaping Talk: Explorations in Naturalistic Planting Design

This is a perennial opportunity to catch my latest talk focused on the wilder frontiers of designed landscapes.

I delivered the talk live to an international audience of gardeners and designers in early April 2022. If you missed it, no worries. You can now watch Wildscaping on my Talks Archive as video-on-demand.

I’ve been evolving and delivering versions of this virtual talk to garden lovers over the past two years – and getting rave reviews along the way. This time gave me the 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 followed up with an extended Q&A discussion.

Here’s what to expect. In part one, we look at the work of some of the most creative planting and garden designers practising today to see how they fuse aesthetics with ecological awareness to create their naturalistic garden masterpieces.

It’s a kind of visual tasting menu of styles, insights, and approaches from the design iconoclasts of the Sheffield School in England to the cerebral wizardry of landscape architect Tom-Stuart Smith. We also explore the ecologically informed artistry of Cassian Schmidt in Germany as well as a recent project from the dynamic duo of Claudia West and Thomas Rainer of Phyto Studio in the US.

There’s more but let that be a surprise.

In part two, my goal is to show how to bring these ideas down to earth as a springboard for your own design work and garden making. We’ll take a deep dive into my diverse projects here in Mono as living examples of what’s possible and where to begin. Yes, it’s true I’m in Canada but many of the same essential design principles and approaches are pretty much universal.

I’ve written about my own garden projects here on the blog at great length. The talk is a chance to catch up with my latest thinking as both the gardens and my pool of knowledge continue to evolve.

A few points to consider:

How are the New Perennialist Talks different? Our idea is to really take the time and space to explore the content at hand, while also leaving ample time for Q&A. We are not here to race the clock.

These talks are open to everyone from anywhere. No membership or organization required. All you need to do is click into the Talks archive to to watch the recording on Vimeo.

Yes, this particular talk is not free. Yes, I’ve been putting out free blog content since 2013 and this new venture with Talks is helping me expand my vision of the site, invite future guest speakers and reach more people. It helps pay for good design, smart web coding, and maybe even lunch.

Interested? I can only say that the initial response from people who have already watched the talk is overwhelmingly positive. It’s super encouraging for me to keep exploring this new direction.