WE MAY KNOW ONE when we see it, but what word best describes an ecological landscape? Compared to traditional, more formal gardens, such native-plant-forward designs are variously labeled as looser, or naturalistic, or wildish—all perfectly accurate.
Is there perhaps a word, though, that really gets at both the visual and functional aspects that these beautiful, biodiversity-supporting plantings embody – a word that can help us set the intention for the plants we choose and where we place them?
“Abundant” is the descriptor of choice and a primary design goal for today’s guest, landscape designer Kelly Norris, author most recently of the book “Your Natural Garden” (affiliate link). Kelly, the former director of horticulture and education at the Greater Des Moines Botanical Garden for eight years, is the founder of The Public Horticulture Company, a Des Moines-based ecological landscape firm. His motto is “just keep planting,” which indeed adds up to abundance … if we follow some general guidelines on what key players we make room for.
Plus: Comment in the box near the bottom of the page for a chance to win a copy of Kelly’s book “Your Natural Garden.”
Read along as you listen to the June 9, 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). (Portrait of Kelly below by Austin Hyler Day.)
abundant landscapes, with kelly norris
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Margaret Roach: Spring madness continuing out there, Kelly? [Laughter.]
Kelly Norris: Spring madness. It has been a robust spring. We’re looking forward to the short rows, as they say in corn country, of what we’ve got left to do here for spring planting.
Margaret: So I wanted to just talk about some of the things we talked about when we did a really interesting “New York Times” column together not long ago. And it was about abundance, and people I think really enjoyed it, the idea of having this word in mind as they were puzzling their way through to a design working with native plants and so forth. And so when you talk about abundance, you don’t mean, “Hey, let’s plant a hundred or a thousand of something” simply to make a visual or aesthetic impression. You have more in mind than that, yes?
Kelly: That’s right. The concept of abundance in ecology is a notion about the number of individuals of a single species in a population somewhere in the wild. The term abundant obviously has a lot of rhetorical and colloquial meanings, just in our daily lives and conversation. But in ecological terms, it is kind of a specific thing. It’s a comparison of volume, of more versus less, and a thinking, an inquiry, an observation around so why do some species occur so abundantly in comparison to others that might be much less frequent? And so that concept and that notion is something we work with a lot in practice that has not only as you articulate obvious aesthetic implications, but also has very valuable ecological ones as well.
Margaret: So a plant might not just look beautiful, but it might call in the important creatures and say, “Hey, I’m here. Are you hungry? Are you thirsty? Do you want some pollen? Do you want some nectar? Do you want to use it as host plant?” Right? It could be all these things, or some of these things.
Kelly: That’s absolutely true. I mean, I think the thing, anybody who’s spent some time in a more naturalistic garden or has been exploring these kinds of gardening and design techniques for a while now comes to realize is that of course plants aren’t integers. They’re not out there just by themselves as lonely things, looking good for our benefit. They’re active participants in the world around them.
And so that becomes part of the way in which we begin to understand abundance, is to understand that it’s not totally happenstance; that there’s obviously some connections. There’s a sort of, in the notion of complex systems theory, there’s ultimately many threads that one could pull as you’re trying to investigate why is Penstemon digitalis right now in the peak of prairie spring just everywhere in a wet prairie or a wet ditch or something like that? Why is that species…?
There’s lots of threads there, right? Part of it’s its sociality, its behavior, its kind of life history. And Penstemon aren’t really the longest-lived plants in the world, so they tend to produce lots of seed in the single generation, and thus their populations kind of ebb and flow in this way, too. But they’re also a very critical resource for a great number of bees this time of year, as well as of course hummingbirds. And so there’s kind of a confluence of these factors that begin to, I don’t want to say diagnose, but I’ll say for the purpose of conversation, begin to diagnose why that might be the case that we see a species like Penstemon digitalis, low-hanging fruit this time of year, being so abundant.
And so if we take that idea and start to use that in a garden setting, then we just sort of take those benefits and kind of scale those to the setting of a garden. We can see some of those results pretty close to home. [Above, Penstemon digitalis by Eric Hunt from Wikipedia.]
Margaret: Sometimes it’s easy to kind of guess at what will be a visually impactful potential choice, a plant that’s showy. “Ooh, If I put a lot of those, it’s really going to look great here,” that kind of thing. And that might be the easier part of the equation. But I mean, you just made the observation about the Penstemon, which is something that’s part of your landscape there.
Where are some of the places that people can learn about what are these abundant, or I think in the “Times” story, you talked about them being “charismatic,” kind of players of each season or whatever. It seems like it’s not enough to say, “Oh, that’ll be pretty.” We want to go deeper. So a source or two that you think about.
Kelly: So one of the things we’re kind of dancing around here, and we can just say it now, is that some of these species are, this isn’t a pattern, for instance, that’s unique to just one or a few places. Something like Rudbeckia hirta, an annual or biennial or short-lived perennial species that we talked about in the “Times” story.
Margaret: The black-eyed Susan as we call it, yes [above, in foreground].
Kelly: That’s right, that’s right. Is a pretty common plant throughout much of North America. And look at how Rudbeckia hirta operates out there in the world. It’s not hard to sort of see that oh, O.K., well, plants that kind of occur everywhere, the everywhere plants, the generalists, more than likely carry alongside them the odds that they’re going to be rather useful to a great number of creatures. Hence one of the reasons why they might be rather abundant, is because their pollination biology is sort of favoring that kind of continuity year to year, decade to decade, eon after eon across such a large geographic area like North America, for instance.
And so looking for those generalist species on lists, the Xerces Society has some great lists of keystone species. National Wildlife Federation has these, too, and keystone species aren’t always exactly generalists; keystones, that’s looking at natural function through a somewhat different lens. But oftentimes, keystone species are kind of understood often at the generic level, Doug Tallamy’s work about oaks brings them to mind. But unless you’re in a forest, an oak isn’t necessarily always an abundant species, in any given ecological system. There’s all kinds of oaks all over the place.
But remember, for people listening, abundance is a measurement at a single-species level of number of individuals. So there’s several concepts here we can start to investigate and look from to start to develop a list for ourselves as gardeners to say, well, in my part of the world, wherever that’s at, if I’m out here on the prairie or if you’re on the East Coast or something, how do you start to ferret out what are those most common and likely and abundant species I might find in any given kind of ecological condition? So those lists are a place to start that adventure.
Margaret: I think Xerces has those regional lists of pollinator-friendly plants. And it is really helpful. And like you say, generalists, plants that serve a lot of customers [laughter]. And because if you do good by a lot of different insect species, they do good by you over the millennia, over the millions of years, and you become widespread and they are supported in numbers; their populations are supported. It’s a one hand washes the other kind of thing over time.
Kelly: Exactly. And there’s kind of this notion in, you could call it nature’s Pareto Principle. I think we refer to it as that 80/20 rule, right?, that we’re all so familiar with in business and management. All this stuff, we hear about that there’s kind of 20 percent of the species out there in the natural world are doing like 80 percent of the ecosystem function. Those numbers are somewhat relative, but the point is that most species, full stop, are not abundant. So most species that even you could imagine in your garden, in their wild homes, wherever they’re from, are often not that abundant.
They might be uncommon to common, or even infrequent, or even rare in some instances. Oftentimes a lot of plants that are quite rare in the wild end up becoming very popular garden plants for obvious sort of aesthetic, ornamental reasons perhaps. So actually, when you think about it, really this idea about frequency isn’t a trait that’s held by many, many, many species in the grand scheme of the world.
It’s oftentimes these very kind of charismatic generalist species that have… They don’t fit a particular profile always, either, except that they have some relationship to their place and the ecosystem services and functions of a place that lead them to be abundant in comparison to others. And so one way to think about it is there’s this kind of 80/20 rule. There’s just a handful of species out there that are kind of carrying all the water, so to speak, in the tall-grass prairie kind of mindset.
I find that a lot of people are often very surprised to learn that historically the prairie was largely grass [laughter]. I mean, the kind of this wonderful palette of prairie flowers, broadly speaking, that have entered the horticultural lexicon in the last 25 or 30 years just smacks at it. It’s like, what do you mean? Where were they at? Well, they were associated oftentimes with episodes of disturbance or certain conditions, stressful conditions, or soil typologies that led to a more likely density of forbs.
But by and large, prairies and the central grassland systems across North America were largely dominated by two, three, four species of grasses. Again, that 80/20 rule of just four species were counting for 80-plus percent of the biomass of a third of the continent at one point in time. Round numbers.
Margaret: I think what you’re saying is that in each season there’s like, again using that Penstemon example currently and so forth where you are—there’s kind of a star of each season or stars of each season. I mean, I think of fall, especially here where I am in the Northeast and in a lot of places, actually different species, but still within the same genera, the asters and the goldenrods. I mean the work that those plants do and the beauty that they provide as well. You know that those are powerhouses, that those are important players.
Kelly: You mentioned two great examples there, both of which happened to be in the same family. I mean, the Asteraceae as a family is probably leading the pack by more than a little in terms of genera and species that are more than likely to be abundant sometimes. I mean, it’s hard to go anywhere in North America at a certain point in the autumn, relatively speaking, wherever that’s at, and not find a charismatic Asteraceae at some point…
Margaret: And speaking of generalists, their flowers, the way they’re built, so to speak, they’re accessible. You don’t have to have a special tongue shape; you don’t have to be an insect with a special body or tongue shape. You can be a lot of different shapes and sizes and structures [laughter] and still take sustenance from a member of the Aster family, right?
Kelly: That’s right. That’s right.
Margaret: So that’s kind of cool. It kind of all makes sense is what I’m saying, in very non-scientific terms [laughter].
Kelly: No, and I think that, as a designer or as a gardener at home, I mean one of the things that you could start to derive from that insight is to say, “O.K., if I’m planning a new planting and I’m thinking about all these species I want to grow, and I’ve got a list of 50 species, we’re going to try to get into this design…” O.K., well, all of those can’t be everywhere all at once.
So if you think about season to season, well, what are my two or three charismatic players in that early spring window, and then that kind of summer solstice window, and then that kind of late summer, and then the fall?
And so you can almost start to build a design process, as we do, around these kind of anchors in any particular season that become the abundant players, the nodes of the both aesthetic and ecological concept of what you’re trying to do. And so sometimes for us, it kind of becomes a template. I mean, it’s not a formula, but there is a sort of scaffold that we can apply to our design process to say, as we’re tooling along thinking about all these plants, “O.K., well, but who’s going to carry the banner here on spring, summer, fall?”
Margaret: But that’s not all you think about. And I was very interested to learn when we did, again, the “Times” story, and also in your book, “Your Natural Garden;” the book is called “Your Natural Garden.” I was very interested to learn about the way you think about the layers of the landscape.
And even though these abundant players, these sort of stars of each season are in your mind, you start with some of the other layers. Because if we don’t have them, just like your example before about the prairie being built with grasses as such an important component: If we don’t have some of these other players, we don’t have a landscape. We just have a big mess.
You talked to me about “matrix” and so forth, the different parts, and that’s a word we hear a lot since we’ve been hearing more about ecological design, we hear about matrix. And so tell me about what layers of the landscape do you think about besides these stars of each season?
Kelly: We’ve been using a three-part typology for years now. I mean, back in my botanical garden days, we kind of hatched onto this somewhat oversimplified way of thinking about any natural landscape, in a way. I mean, there’s various languages, different designers and schools of thought have kind of different architectures of words for the same ideas. But in our work, we think about matrix, structure, and vignettes.
And matrix is for us a layer of the landscape that’s often equated to being green mulch. It’s plants that are kind of low in profile and tend to form fairly a social fabric over the space that we’re working in.
The structural layer is usually a woody or emergent perennial character; it’s something that’s generally paying the rent more than once, as the phrase goes. It’s persistent throughout the growing season. It becomes a scaffold for the rest of the planting.
So we have the floor and the walls here of the house [laughter], and the interior becomes kind of the vignettes, as that kind of seasonal cadence that moves through the whole growing season. And so it’s within that layer that we’re probably talking about abundance in the way we’re talking about it from maybe a floral bias, where we’re most concerned about that and saying, what resources are we providing for the ecological network that every planting, every garden is already a part of? And so those kind of seasonal anchors, those key charismatic species, become kind of a subset of that vignettes layer.
Now, obviously, back to the matrix for a minute, those are generally fairly abundant players, too. They’re not often necessarily species that end up having lots of immediate floral-resource value because they often tend to be, they might be graminoids—Carex, grasses, etc. Not always certainly, but they have other roles to play ecologically. But when we think about abundance, I think there’s a little bit of a floral bias to I think our conversation today, inherent to what we’re talking about. Because we’re trying to do something that’s also showy and aesthetic, but also something that’s feeding creatures out there in the world.
Margaret: Well, and that’s why I wanted to sort of double back to that, especially the matrix part, because as I said, first of all, I hear and read more about that word since we’ve been talking and working more in native plants and ecological or ecologically focused designs and so forth. I hear people talk about it, but it’s easy to get distracted as a gardener [laughter] when shopping the nursery or the catalogs, especially online, and go for all the showy stuff and forget that we need to make a substantial investment in that, as you say, green mulch.
I mean, the designer Claudia West said to me years ago, Claudia from Phyto Design, she said to me, “Plants are the mulch.” You know what I mean? Not stuff in bags, Margaret, right? [Laughter.] And so we mustn’t just purchase these vignette types, the vignette anchors, any more than we must only purchase the anchors of the sort of canopy or the shrub layer or whatever, unless we just want to make a forest. But even in a forest, there used to be—before all hell broke loose environmentally—a herbaceous layer, too, down below [laughter]. [Above: At Simpson College in Iowa, Kelly combined Rudbeckia hirta, Artemisia ludoviciana ‘Garden Ghost,’ and various coneflowers (Echinacea). Photo by Austin Hyler Day.]
Kelly: White-tailed deer hadn’t grazed it enough.
Margaret: Yeah, exactly. But it’s very important to discipline ourselves and think about that matrix layer, not just the pretty faces.
Kelly: It is the foundation, I mean, of so much of what we’re doing. And actually in our layout process, when we take this kind of quantitative, species-rich model to the field to actually install, we have what we call an order of operations that breaks the design out into a series of steps, almost like a code that your programmer might be writing, one script at a time.
And so we start with the matrix oftentimes following, of course, the structure layout, before we even get to all the fun stuff, the flowers and all that kind of thing. Because we want to make sure that that’s hardwired, even just visually during our process.
There’s many exceptions to that, and there’s many good reasons for not a singular methodology here. But I guess the point I’m trying to make is that we give that a priority in our thinking, not only in the studio, but also in the field to say: We can’t forget to leave space for this. We have to really make sure that we’re building the house in such a way that it has a lot of integrity for a long time.
Margaret: And I keep thinking each time I talk about this with an expert such as yourself, I think about the first time I visited the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and I saw the restored prairie there.
And I guess I was thinking wildflowers [laughter]—emphasis on flowers. And to see, as you said earlier, that it might be just down to several species and a couple of them are grasses, certainly. And to see these essential combinations. And yes, there’s going to be these four moments or erupting seasonally, but the anchor, that grounding of the whole community—because it is a community of plants.
Kelly: That’s absolutely right. And I mean, I love what you’re saying; that’s a landscape that means a lot to me personally.
Margaret: The Curtis Prairie.
Kelly: I’ve been many times over the years. And of course when you start to think at that scale and that level of spatial thinking, and I would say this as a closing thought for anybody out there, regardless of the size of your garden: There’s something about this that can feel very granular. And we’re putting combinations of certain species together as you allude to, I think there becomes an almost atmospheric quality when you start to move beyond the threes and the fives stuck together [laughter], and you see how some of these patterns, just a handful of these species, start to play out and become an atmospheric tie that binds the whole experience of the landscape together. And it creates a different kind of sensation. And that’s, I think, what we’re always chasing.
Margaret: In the “Times” story you even pointed out to me that even that phenomenon of the desert superbloom, isn’t just the California poppies we see for miles in front of us. It’s much more complex than that, isn’t it? [Above, desert bells (Phacelia campanularia) and desert gold poppy (Eschscholzia glyptosperma) in Joshua Tree National Park.]
Kelly: Right. Yeah. There’s so much more You get out there in the field and you think, “Oh, that’s just a field of California poppies.” And you end up out in the middle of it and you realize, “Oh my God, there’s four species of lupines and there’s five Phacelia and there’s…” And there’s just suddenly all this diversity. It’s not hiding out there, it’s just that relatively speaking our brains are really good at homogenizing and minimizing the complexity of what we see sometimes.
So when you get closer to it, you start to realize, wow, there’s an incredible amount of diversity here. And for me, it carries into practice as a reminder to say that you can create landscapes that are highly diverse, that have lots of things going on in them, so to speak, and you can get by with it if there are a few of those players that are just kind of everywhere all at once. They’re sort of helping to keep the whole scene cohesive and sensible.
Margaret: The supporting actors, like a good Broadway show, right? It’s not just about the lead, the lead person.
Kelly: That’s right. It’s divas and dancers, right? [Laughter.] It’s “42nd Street.” Everybody marching.
Margaret: The chorus. The chorus. Don’t forget the chorus. Well, Kelly, I’m always glad to speak to you, and thanks for sharing this. I hope I’ll speak to you again soon. Thank you.
Kelly: Oh, thank you so much. It’s always a pleasure.
(Photos by Kelly Norris except as noted.)
enter to win a copy of ‘your natural garden’
I’LL BUY A COPY of Kelly Norris’s “Your Natural Garden: A Practical Guide to Caring for an Ecologically Vibrant Home Garden,” for one lucky reader. All you have to do to enter is answer this question in the comments box below:
Is there a native plant that has an abundant moment in your garden in one season or another?
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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 June 9, 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).
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