Your Natural Garden: A Practical Guide to Caring for an Ecologically Vibrant Home Garden

A valuable and artfully crafted guide to tending a naturalistic garden.

From plantsman Kelly Norris, author of New Naturalism, comes a much-needed handbook to maintaining today’s natural gardens. Naturalistic plantings, overflowing with biodiverse communities of plants, are filling front and backyards around the globe with colorful blooms, easy-care plants, and wildlife habitat. But caring for a naturalistic garden is vastly different than caring for a traditional home landscape of carefully manicured plants separated by mulch and regularly primped and pruned. In Your Natural Garden, tending your garden properly means understanding its connection to the greater natural world and using garden care methods that mimic nature instead of controlling it.

Page by page, you’re guided through all the seasons of a naturalistic garden’s life and the tasks and to-dos that come with each of them. Including how to:

Encourage and establish complexity in a new garden
Promote growth and variation by letting your plants self propagate
Determine when and what to edit, and when it’s best to let chaos rein
Decide if and when weeding is necessary
Foster the insects and other animals that rely on your plants
Understand succession in the naturalistic garden and why it’s important
Know when it’s time to cut back your garden and how to do it right

Verdant photographs accompany the text throughout, offering examples of well-tended naturalistic plantings and the tasks that are needed to properly care for them.