How Natural Gardens Celebrate Abundance

Nature is abundant. So are natural gardens. Here are four ways we celebrate “more” when we plant naturalistically.

This spring, just like the spring before, a truck will arrive at my Lucas House HQ in Haliburton. In its trailer will be hundreds, maybe thousands, of plants.

I’ll place the plants in and around my green cage and someone will say, “That’s a lot of plants, Simon!”.
I will reply “yes”, because it’s true. And that’s the point.

Natural gardening is about abundance – because nature is about abundance. Just think how nature likes to fill a void: every bare patch of earth, every crack in the sidewalk is home to something. Each fall, millions of leaves carpet the County. Every spring, pollen lays thick on our windshields and decks.

When you’re gardening for life, as we do here at Grounded, we’re adding more life to the world.

Planting densely

First, we use a lot of plants. If we have a site that is 1,000 sq ft, it’s likely we will order 1,200 little plants to fill it with. There’s lots of good reasons for this: the density mimics nature, but it also helps cover the ground quickly. The less bare ground, the fewer weeds. It’s as simple as that.

We call this a green mulch. While we often put mulch down in the first year while the plants focus on growing roots, by year two, the plants should be their own mulch.

The good news is, these small plants are a lot cheaper than larger, older plants. And if we take care of them, they catch up with the bigger plants pretty soon.

Large groups of plants

Abundance isn’t just about the sheer quantity of plants. We like to plant each species abundantly too.

While a traditional garden might have just one or two specimens of a species, we usually put them in groups of three, five, seven – or even more. Again, this is how nature is. Plus, grouping more plants together has the benefit of making the design legible: you have a drift of Mountain Mint here and a clump of Pale Purple Coneflower there.

Plants in layers

Want more abundance? Plant in layers! Most of the designs we install have three layers: the matrix, or groundcover, layer; the vignette layer; and the structural layer.

The matrix layer does the hard work. Indeed, because it’s so important, about half the plants we choose are typical matrix species. This is layer is fundamental to creating a functional plant community.
Planted within the groundcover layer are vignette plants. These are the groups of seasonal flowering perennials that provide colour and interest for us and pollen for insects.

The top layer is the structural layer, which provides more habitat and often year-round height and interest.

Abundance in community

But there’s more! Natural gardeners see their landscapes as communities instead of single, separate plants. We know from ecology that no organism stands alone – each plant (indeed, each of us) relies on a whole network of other organisms.

When we design a landscape here at Grounded, we don’t think of plants one by one, we think of how they will interact; how one plant can help (or hinder) the other. We know a plant’s growth strategy (is it competitive or is it suited to difficult conditions?) and we know how social it is (does it like to grow in small groups or is it happier in huge masses?).

Perhaps we’re getting to the point here. We’re building a community of which we are part. We’re not here just to serve us, we’re here to serve all of us. That’s true abundance.