AS MANY OF US heavy up on native plants and transition larger areas of our landscapes toward more naturalistic styles of design, there’s a lot to learn—or maybe unlearn, if our gardening experience up until now was a bit more traditionally formal and ornamentally focused. A new book called “Your Natural Garden” by ecological garden designer Kelly Norris of Des Moines, Iowa, asks and answers a lot of the questions we may find ourselves encountering along the way.
In our recent conversation, Kelly, who is also the former director of horticulture and education at the Greater Des Moines Botanical Garden, shared some advice on making and maintaining an ecological garden. That’s part of his home garden in the photo up top.
Plus: Comment in the box near the bottom of the page for a chance to win a copy of his latest book, “Your Natural Garden: A Practical Guide to Caring for an Ecologically Vibrant Home Garden” (affiliate link).
Read along as you listen to the Jan. 13, 2025 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on Apple Podcasts (iTunes) or Spotify (and browse my archive of podcasts here).
ecological gardens, with kelly norris
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Margaret Roach: Congratulations on the new book. And how is it in Des Moines so far in this new year? What’s the weather doing out there?
Kelly Norris: It’s a bit chilly, but it is January in Des Moines, so we sort of expect that at some point we’re going to see some below-zero temperatures and a little snow cover, so it’s on par for winter.
Margaret: O.K. So to get us started, tell those listening who won’t have yet seen your latest book, because it’s literally brand new: What your goal was with it—what’s it about? How did this come to pass, and what was the message you most of all wanted to get across with it?
Kelly: My previous book, “New Naturalism” [affiliate link], was really a design book, and I finished that and realized there was so much more to say. I mean, as soon as you design and kind of conceive of making a new garden in a new way, what happens next? And of course, I was chronicling in some ways my own journey, where in 2017 I bought my home and garden that we call Three Oaks [photo, top of page]. And this process of unlearning a little bit about how we think about gardens and our roles in gardens requires a little bit of unraveling to think about or maybe to rethink how we work in a natural garden, and what work is and labor is. So that’s what this book is trying to address, is how do you garden differently?
Margaret: Yeah. Well, throughout the book it seemed to me that the garden and the gardener are very engaged, very working in concert, intimate, involved. And I think that’s very realistic when one’s talking about a natural garden, especially. Because it’s like these are not gardens—and hopefully no gardens are—but these are not gardens that are something that you just sort of install or imprint on the place and stand back and admire, like a painting on the wall or something. I mean, these are gardens of engagement.
And you say in the book, in the natural garden you say that in the process of gardening, the gardener becomes a keystone species, you say— “an active positive force of ecological disturbance.” Tell us more about that take on things. The idea of each of us potentially becoming a keystone species of this community, this habitat.
Kelly: Yeah, this idea of a keystone species, of course, is a classical notion in ecology. And I remember learning about it in a graduate seminar on conservation biology, and probably hadn’t thought about it again for years later until you start to realize that it’s a proxy comparison, if you will. But if you start to realize that, I mean a garden built of one’s aesthetic interests, or collector purposes or passions, otherwise wouldn’t exist without those things.
So if you take that away for a moment and you think, O.K., well the garden I’m endeavoring to create is suddenly a habitat is a home for other things—not as if those creatures weren’t there already—but is suddenly now directed and intentional about a specific purpose. You start to think again about yourself as a bit of a co-conspirator, but the labor is different, the effort is different. And so I’ve heard people say to me over the years, well, it’s like an identity crisis. What will I do in a natural garden if plants are the ones that are suddenly in the lead? And I think the idea is to say, well, a keystone species in nature isn’t doing all of the things, but its efforts and its presence and its role is sort of what keeps a lot of other things in orbit. And so it’s one way to rethink or reshift the idea of what it means to be a gardener.
Margaret: Yeah, I loved one page or section called “How to Know a Plant,” and it’s sort of something I’m obsessed with, that really happened to me. The wanting to really know a plant happened to me early on as a gardener, having to do with weeds, and I was fighting and fighting and fighting and fighting, and then I realized I didn’t even know their damn names.
Kelly: Yes, right!
Margaret: You know what I mean? I didn’t know if they were rhizomatous or if they had whatever. I didn’t know if they were biennial or annual or perennial. I didn’t know anything. I didn’t know what their secret weapons were. I didn’t know their life histories. And I thought, know your weeds, and then maybe you can outsmart some of them.
So anyway, that’s how I got, so when I read, I came to that page, I turned to that page that said, “How to Know Plant” and I was like: Yes!
So now that’s not exactly what your section is about, but you encourage us to get familiar, really familiar with the plants we planted that are going to make up the garden, what their roles are, how long do they live, all these things. So let’s talk about that a little bit, and why you ask us that in the book or tell us that in the book: “How to Know a Plant.” You imply that we need to know a plant, each plant.
Kelly: I love your anecdote [laughter] because, and we actually, I write an essay about weeding in that kind of very notion because we have a rule here at home: You can’t pull it if you can’t name it. You can’t weed it out if you can’t identify it or have some understanding… I mean, if you literally can’t label it even or acknowledge it and name, what do you really know about it beyond a few passing glimpses?
And so I think the thing a lot of people in real time are out there learning is that maybe they’re adding more native plants or they’re growing native plants from different sources than before. You know, showy goldenrod is not showy goldenrod is not showy goldenrod. Plants are more than even just a name. In fact, particularly broadly distributed species like a showy goldenrod, for instance, from different provenances, different places, could behave entirely differently in a garden of any place. Not to mention just the one place you may be gardening in. And so understanding the complexities of even individuals of a plant species can start to shed an enormous amount of light on some of the conundrums we face as gardeners, and why we’re confounded by the way plants behave sometimes as we encounter them.
Margaret: Well, one attribute that you mentioned in that section: how long does it live? And I mean, that just opens the whole floodgate of succession [laughter] and who’s going to outlive who and who’s going to happen over time, time-lapse photography, so to speak? Right?
Kelly: Yeah, no, I mean the life history thing is one dimension, but lifespan is…. Sometimes you make a new garden and that first year can be brutal. And you can think, why am I doing this? What have I done? I mean, it feels like you’ve opened Pandora’s box, but oftentimes that initial response of a site, its most recent natural history expressing itself is expressed in short-lived ruderal annual or biennial species. And those so-called problems, as it may seem when you’re confronting them, may not really be that problematic in the long run. It may just be a question of patience and time.
Margaret: So some things that initially get going, so to speak, more quickly, while the more slow-to-develop plants haven’t filled in yet. But those slower-to-develop plants will eventually outcompete some of those early starters in some cases, is that what happens?
Kelly: In a lot of cases. I mean like anything in ecology, there are few universal rules like that that apply equally in all circumstances. But that is to say in a meadow, for instance, in the first year, we don’t usually get too hung up on a lot of weedy annual species. The only caveat being that if it’s a species that can seed bank really well, we don’t want to permit it to go to seed. If we can help it, we’d like to intervene if we can. So there, there’s some nuance certainly about how any of these ideas come to be applied. But in the grand scheme of the world, it’s like triage, right? It’s like if you’re going to be worrying about something, annual weeds the first year after a new planting maybe aren’t the highest thing on my list.
Margaret: Right. On the other hand, the other part of that is that sometimes in the early years of a planting, I may have chosen as a gardener, “Oh, I’m going to have this annual or this biennial,” and “Oh, I love it,” and I get it kind of attached to it. [Laughter.]
Three to five years later, oops, I don’t have it anymore, and I’m upset; I’m frustrated, and I don’t understand. Or at least the first time that happens to you as a more naturalistic gardener, you don’t understand what happened. Why didn’t that stay with me?
Because we were more accustomed, if we were gardening as I said in the introduction in the sort of more traditional ornamentally focused manner… We knew those plants; we knew what we called annuals and so forth. We didn’t expect our zinnias to come back next year. But in this case, when I’m making a meadow or something, I didn’t think that they would disappear. I thought they were part of the palette. And it’s frustrating, it’s confusing.
Kelly: Well, and that’s always then the opportunity to think, how do I introduce a little disturbance, a little chaos into the system to create an opportunity for those species to live? And that’s one of the things about gardening that’s inherently I think true for a lot of us, is it’s in ecological terms fairly disturbing, and disturbance has positive effects. It can be a way to keep some species in the system—annual species that might have been more prevalent in the early years of a landscaper planting—with us over the long haul, if we devise a way to give them a niche to fill in the years to come.
Margaret: So “disturbance,” meaning cultivating a little soil here or there to give them an opening, so to speak?
Kelly: Absolutely. It could be agitation of the soil bed. It could be removing something that’s died, and leaving that space under careful watch, perhaps, to respond in its own right, if something that you had in an earlier life of the planting is in the seed bank or something. It could just be a reason maybe to expand a planting or expand the shape of a bed or something to again create just a little more sort of disturbed edge for a species like that to appear.
Margaret: Right. And sort of on the other side of that, sometimes disturbance—like I have a meadow and I have woody things coming into it, the succession. And so I’ve got Rubus and all kinds of naughty creatures. And when you go to weed those out, and if you decide you’re going to either dig or pull, well, you can open up—you can make disturbances [laughter]—and some of those can really backfire and you get worse stuff.
Kelly: Yeah. It’s a question of knowing when to promote a sense of stability and when to toss the dice [laughter].
Margaret: And so is it always an experiment? I mean, even at your level of expertise and with all the gardens you’ve designed and worked on and so forth, does it remain an adventure, or is there a really firm rule book? It seemed to me from this book, you’re giving us ways of thinking, but there isn’t an exact answer to every circumstance. Do you know what I mean? [laughter]
Kelly: Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. We teach a continuing-education program called The New Naturalism Academy through the studio, and we often tell people on the very first night of every session that the question is really about what it depends on [laughter]. It’s like all things depend, but what does it depend on?
And so the book is, as you note, about trying to establish a pattern framework so that you can start to detect and see patterns in a kind of general sort of way, in a template kind of way. But it does remain an adventure in some ways, because you can take these concepts, these narratives, these frameworks from ecology, but the thing is, what we’re trying to do in gardens is we’re trying to take a science that’s built at the scale of a landscape and fit it into the form of something that’s much smaller and thus much more prone to random effects of disturbance or even just chance alone.
And so it is kind of a new frontier in that way. We know a lot about ecology in the world. There’s a lot we don’t know about, but we know a lot about landscape ecology. We don’t know a lot about landscape ecology at really small, finite scales—at a half-acre in someone’s backyard. And so that is what keeps it interesting for me in practice, for sure.
Margaret: Yeah, that’s a good point that the scale is another factor, because it may be in the location that we have information about the ecology of that region and the soils and the climate and the this and the that, and we know the native plants theoretically of that area. But when you slice it that small, we don’t really know how that impacts it. That’s an interesting point.
You have a section, another section in the book that caught my eye. I think it’s one of the chapters, and I should say that the chapters or sections, of the book, they have interesting titles. It’s not like spring, summer, fall and winter or whatever [laughter]. Most garden books are perennials, annuals bulbs and trees or whatever. The four sections, I think, are Place, Complexity, Legibility, and Flow.
So in the section about legibility, you have a discussion of something called “5 Ways to Develop Your Natural Style.” And I suspect maybe some of those are tenets that maybe you help your design clients to grasp, or you learned from having worked with design clients or things that you felt like people always needed to know or whatever. I wondered if we could talk about those five a little bit.
Kelly: Absolutely. I mean, these ideas, I think, come from my long position that when you can relate a landscape to people’s sense of style, just simply how they want to see and live in the world, it creates a more authentic experience. I mean, people care about the nature that they can experience, and the nature that so many of us get to experience is that which is just beyond the window or the door of the places we live and work.
And so I think to comment we just made about all the things we don’t understand about natural gardens at a small scale, the reason it’s still important is because it is so often the nature that we experience. And so I think when we can find ways to relate to it, and understand it, and revel in it, the more that it something to us in the way we go about our life. And so as you think about ways to sort of take a more traditional approach to gardening into a natural realm, there’s elements of style, a la “Strunk & White” [laughter], that are important to consider.
Margaret: I think the first of these five ways you say to develop our style: “Discover your interests.” So tell me about what does that mandate or that mantra mean?
Kelly: Well, I think people are coming to this topic, this interest in gardening with natives and pollinators, from all these different motivations, whether it’s native plants or whether it’s pollinators, whether it’s habitat, whether it’s sense of place, whatever. So whatever that is, you can home in on that and find a community of people out there on Facebook or in social media that can support that. You can find somebody who’s gone totally down the rabbit hole and found all the crazy places to go buy rare native plants or whatever. I mean, so like there’s an interest group around each of these sort of subtopics that are kind of the launch pads into it.
Margaret: O.K., so if you’re bird-mad, you can go, yeah, you can explore that, and you can say, “That’s my big interest, and I want that to be an important in front of mind,” so to speak. Yeah. And then you say the second one, you say, “Translate, don’t copy.” Tell me what that means.
Kelly: Well, the internet’s a wild and wonderful place, but the world gets ever smaller, click by click. And so sometimes it’s easy to sort of pull up something and think, that’s what I want to do, without first considering where is that [laughter], and what does that have to do with the place I live and grow? It might be very inspiring, and it might even be in that sense creatively relevant, but it might not be realistic, either.
Margaret: And then a really great Number 3 is great, and a lot of us do this: We bite off more than we can chew. “Experiment, small-scale first,” you say.
Kelly: Yeah, I need to learn this one myself, too [laughter], but I’m a scale guy, so I guess I like scale. Here I am contradicting myself, but for most people, I think there’s just a rational good sense, a bit of advice here, that you should try it on a small scale first just to see how it feels, right?, just to start to see what you don’t know. And it is easy to scale up once you get a little success.
Margaret: And then another one that I just think is one of the best pieces of garden-design advice, no matter what your style is, “Repeat, repeat, repeat.”
Kelly: Yeah. I mean, if you hatch onto a good idea, don’t put it on a pedestal and make it special. Keep doing it. It’s like that recipe that you find in your favorite cookbook or something. You start to get good at it, and you think, well, what if I added this? And then you riff on it a little bit, and then you kind of play with it, and it starts to become an underlying pattern or rhythm, but it starts to take on a life of its own.
Margaret: And I think when a visitor comes and experiences a place, that is often what lends a lot of the coherence, is the repetition that they may at first glance—they may not understand the whole thing or take it all in, but they may see some common elements repeated, whether it’s actual plants or colors or shapes or whatever it is, some elements that pull it together.
Kelly: It’s a motif of sorts.
Margaret: And then the hardest one on the list of the five ways to develop our natural style is: “Don’t underestimate the time or the effort it takes for an idea to develop.” [Laughter.] So is that like don’t be impatient, don’t be in a hurry?
Kelly: It kind of is. I mean, because in one sense, one of the great beauties about natural gardening is the dimension of time and celebrating the dimensions of change. You’re not planting one garden, you’re planting five gardens experienced over five years. I mean, you’re versioning yourself a little bit.
And so I think sometimes, and I do this all the time, I’ll be in tour own garden here in the middle of the summer and I’ll think, “Gosh, it just isn’t working.” I’m photographing, or I’m making notes about it. And then six months later, I realized A, it wasn’t all that bad, and B, it’s like that’s just the step between where I started and where I think I’m going. And so sometimes the perspective of a cold climate in a winter does temper one’s passions one way or the other about that. But I think it is a little bit of a piece of advice is to slow down and appreciate the journey and the process a little bit, because that’s really what it’s about.
Margaret: And there’s so much learning in that if you can slow down, there’s so much learning potentially.
Kelly: Absolutely.
Margaret: Yeah. I also want to sort of ask an unrelated question, since it’s kind of catalog-shopping season or just about. And a lot of times gardeners of all types of all varieties get, we get sucked in by pretty, colorful photos of this plant or that plant. And I wonder, do you think about color right away when creating a design or is that a primary element or a secondary element? Where’s color fit in for you?
Kelly: It’s like the last thing I think about-
Margaret: Interesting.
Kelly: …because I almost never think about it first and foremost. In fact, I have a little scaffold that we teach about in the academy and that we use every day in practice. It’s like a rubric against your own work, right? When we’re going through and checking designs and coming to the end of a process, one of those things that I often have to check myself on is: Do we have a coherence of color? Do we have a sequencing of color? Sometimes it happens just organically, not to sound kind of hokey about it, but it sometimes comes into its own reality because of particular associations or plant combinations or elements of plant communities we’re building. But it’s almost never something that’s first and foremost on my mind. I’m much more interested in how do these plantings work? How do they live and thrive? And the aesthetic of it is obviously important, but it’s tertiary at the earliest.
Margaret: I just wanted to make you say that out loud, because I took that away from the book, and I felt like, again, the catalog season, what happens? “Oh, look how pretty that oh, oh, oh; that’s a pretty color.” You know what I mean? And those impulses aren’t necessarily the way to shop for plants. Some of these other thoughts that we’ve been talking about, I think are much more to the point, what’s its role going to be, and how is it going to serve in the community we’re building and so forth.
But I want to congratulate you again on the book. So there’s a lot going on: You’re teaching, you do lecture all the time. You’ve got your design business. A lot of facets to the operation over there, Kelly.
Kelly: I like to stay busy and engaged. [Laughter.]
Margaret: Apparently. Apparently. Well, I’m so glad that you joined us today to talk about the new book and give us some advice. Thank you.
(All photos courtesy of Kelly Norris.)
enter to win a copy of ‘your natural garden’
I’LL BUY A COPY of “Your Natural Garden: A Practical Guide to Caring for an Ecologically Vibrant Home Garden” by Kelly Norris for one lucky reader. All you have to do to enter is answer this question in the comments box below:
Have you encountered a question when loosening up part of your landscape with natives? Tell us where you are located.
No answer, or feeling shy? Just say something like “count me in” and I will, but a reply is even better. I’ll select a random winner after entries close Tuesday, Jan. 21 at midnight. Good luck to all.
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prefer the podcast version of the show?
MY WEEKLY public-radio show, rated a “top-5 garden podcast” by “The Guardian” newspaper in the UK, began its 15th year in March 2024. It’s produced at Robin Hood Radio, the smallest NPR station in the nation. Listen locally in the Hudson Valley (NY)-Berkshires (MA)-Litchfield Hills (CT) Mondays at 8:30 AM Eastern, rerun at 8:30 Saturdays. Or play the Jan. 13, 2025 show using the player near the top of this transcript. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes/Apple Podcasts or Spotify (and browse my archive of podcasts here).
