Top Highlights

• When I heard Larry Weaner speak at one of his annual ecological landscaping conferences, I knew I had found my answer. The strategies he laid out promised to make each garden a source of ecological renewal. What’s more, he had the experience to prove his strategies could work. By the time I heard him talk, he had been designing gardens for more tha...
• For me, the most persuasive reasons are that it’s easier and far more rewarding to transform the human landscape in this fashion.
• The ways in which gardeners till and weed, irrigate, and fertilize their plots, for example, cause perpetual disturbance to the ecologies of those areas and create an irresistible invitation to invasive species.
• In this alternative approach, less is truly more. Minimizing intervention and letting the indigenous vegetation dictate plant selection and, as much as possible, do the planting, produces a garden landscape that flourishes without the traditional injections of irrigation and fertilizers and is better able to cope on its own with weeds and pests.
• It turns the landscape from a consumer of resources and a polluter into a source of environmental renewal: a nexus of stormwater absorption and purification, a sanctuary for indigenous wildlife, and a protector of biodiversity. These are all important, even essential. What I relish most, though, and what I believe will speak most powerfully to read...