Your Natural Garden: The New Go-To Book for Landscaping the Better Way

A new book by Kelly D. Norris is set to become the go-to guide for those who want to understand natural gardening and landscaping.

Uh-oh. It looks like I have a new book to recommend. And it’s probably going to become my number one choice when people ask: what exactly do you do?

Kelly D. Norris is a leading light in naturalistic planting design. I’ve had the privilege of studying under him twice as part of his New Naturalism Academy, including having a planting design critiqued by him. This is a person who knows his alliums.

A mind shift

The past few years have seen the kind of landscape designs I create here at Grounded start to enter the mainstream. Many books are available, as are online courses for those who want to go deeper.

Your Natural Garden brings it all together. Not only is it a practical guide to how to create natural gardens, but it also puts a frame around the underlying philosophy of this type of landscaping. Embracing this new paradigm is important because once you undergo the mind shift from control to collaboration and from dominant species to keystone species, everything makes sense. And once it makes sense, it’s radically apparent that natural gardening is the only way to go. Indeed, much of traditional horticulture and traditional gardening seems anachronistic.

It starts with place

I know from my experience studying with Norris that place is key to his work. This isn’t just about place in the way of native plants – species from the local area -, nor is it just about the environmental conditions of the site. It’s also about honoring and reflecting the feeling of a particular place. Working with what’s special about a particular location is what sets naturalistic landscaping apart from much of traditional gardening.

Place is both physical and imagined, an experience that leads to deep questions. How will you make a garden here?

^{Kelly Norris, Your Natural Garden}

This attitude of humility (my word) underlies much of natural gardening. It’s about working with nature, stewarding plants, and realizing that a garden is never finished. Indeed, gardening for life is, as Norris points out, playing an infinite game, where you don’t aim for a final state of victory but instead you win by continuing the game. In other words, a natural garden is never done – and that’s a good thing.

Playing the game this way puts humans in a role I believe we always should have been playing – that of keystone species. I was delighted to see Norris pick up on this concept. It’s about using our knowledge and skills to help nature be its best self, dancing with plants to develop a landscape that is pleasing to us and pleasing to the rest of nature too.

The most daunting and yet liberating idea to keep in your mind as you kneel to the ground is that your garden transforms slowly and unceasingly. It’s constantly dynamic.

_{Kelly D. Norris, Your Natural Garden}

From concept to practice

Norris has an academic and artistic background – it shows in this book. But Your Natural Garden isn’t just about ideas. It’s practical, too. The book talks about the importance of soil, how plants grow, how habitats work, and the importance of diversity and abundance. It discusses important design topics – vital if naturalistic plantings are to be accepted as anything other than “weeds”. You’ll also find primers here on weeding, pruning, and watering.

Finally, the book talks about four typical archetypes: woodlands, meadows and prairies, arid lands, and steppes. In each the type of planting is discussed, along with long-term management and stewardship.

Playing the game

I was delighted that stewardship plays such a central role in this book. If natural gardens are an infinite game, and if humans are a keystone species, a natural garden is anything but one-and-done. Education in this field has been lacking in this important aspect. This hole has become one of the hot topics in natural gardening circles because there’s no point installing lots of beautiful gardens if we don’t look after them. They may be low-maintenance compared to weekly lawn care, but stewardship requires knowledge and skill.

This is one of the reasons this book is important. While you won’t find detailed step-by-step instructions here, the book gives the reader a paradigm from which to operate. The good news is, there is more detailed information available if you want more practical steps (try New Directions in the American Landscape, Garden Masterclass, Benjamin Vogt, and Norris himself). But without the underlying understanding of what natural gardening is, just following steps is merely gardening by numbers. We’re better off when we look at it in the round.

Kudos to Norris for this book. It’s an aesthetically beautiful and inspirational way to start 2025.

Your Natural Garden is available locally from Master’s Book Store. The price is $36.