MORE ISN’T ALWAYS better, of course. More isn’t always better, of course, but in the case of the gardens profiled in the new book “Garden to the Max,” it definitely is, whether more color, more texture, more drama or all of the above, and then some, smartly used for maximum impact.
The many faces of maximalist gardening, plus perhaps some inspiration for turning up the volume in your own landscape, was what I talked about with the book’s author, Teresa Woodard, who gardens near Columbus, Ohio. With photographer Bob Stefko, Teresa has created “Garden to the Max: Joyful, Visionary, Maximalist Design” (affiliate link), which looks at 20 gardens around the country–from a 700-square-foot patio to a multi-acre estate–each created by extreme plant lovers with a maximalist approach to garden-making, no matter the size of their space.
Plus: Enter to win a copy of the new book by commenting in the box near the bottom of the page.
Read along as you listen to the March 31, 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).
maximalist gardening, with teresa woodard
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Margaret Roach: Welcome, Teresa; how are you?
Teresa Woodard: I’m doing great. The daffodils are in bloom, so that always brings me lots of cheer.
Margaret: You’re ahead of me; you’re ahead of me; I don’t have any yet. I’m still in winter and snowdrops. [Laughter.] Oh yeah.
Well, what a colorful and welcome book. It’s very, very, very, very, very cheerful just to look at it. It’s just so bright. So just to start, what’s maximalism, and when did you first encounter it in gardens?
Teresa: Well, maximalism to me is the opposite of minimalism. It’s kind of embracing that “more is more” mentality, and that’s easy to do with plants because there’s always one more that we want to add to our gardens. But for me to see how that transfers from the interior design world and fashion world into the gardening world, I saw this in my garden writing. I would be drawn to these bold kind of visionary gardeners, and the ones that were most experimental in their gardens. And I would come home and try some of these ideas in my own backyard. And so I thought if some of these bold gardens inspired me, perhaps they would also inspire others with this maximalist style.
Margaret: And one of the interesting points you make in the book is that sort of maxing out on plants, the abundance thing of more and more and more plants, it can also correlate with the ecological benefits that we’re all seeking, that we’re learning more about as gardeners. That more is more in terms of pollinator gardens and the abundance, not just one plant over here and a lot of mulch in between until you get to the other plant over there [laughter]. But abundance is good in a different way too. Yes?
Teresa: Absolutely. And there are so many eco benefits of an abundant garden, whether it’s providing food and shelter for wildlife and pollinators, or if it’s reducing carbon footprint, or even just bringing more joy to your community and neighbors. I think this abundant style has many benefits beyond just personal expression. It can be very purposeful.
Margaret: And I came upon a word in the book a number of times, which just made it all really make so much sense. The word “curation,” curating and curation, not just collecting or amassing more, more more more more, and having it all together in proximity, but really thoughtfully editing and showcasing. And that’s really, I think, a big part of the 20 gardeners that you picked to profile, to showcase their gardens and their styles and their obsessions, their passions. They were also all curators, even though they had very different places and very different interests in their maximalism. They all were curators, weren’t they?
Teresa: Absolutely, that’s a great point. They all are curators, and I think some people think that maximalism means chaos, and where’s the line between maximalism and chaos? And I think it is being intentional in your colors, and being intentional in your layering and your textures. And all of these gardeners were incredibly gracious to open their gardens to us and share the lessons from their gardens with us, and how they do curate these spaces. It’s very much an intentional look. There’s an artistry to it, and knowing how to combine bold colors and layer plants.
Margaret: Yeah, sometimes it’s other… I mean, there was one garden in Colorado where it was textural layers. It was like it wasn’t even so much color as texture to the max. Want to tell us about that?
Teresa: Yeah. Lauren Springer is in Fort Collins, and she really prefers texture over color, which I thought was interesting. And she told me she likes to look at a landscape as if it were a black-and-white image so that you see it in the gray tones, and that highlights the forms and the textures, which I thought that was a fun takeaway for me to start looking at a garden as a black-and-white image. And she’s an artist in how she combines fine grasses, but then adds in these sculptural yuccas that have these great silhouettes, or these cacti that are prickly and shapely. So she uses textures in a maximalist way.
Margaret: Right. Really layers of them, in a sense.
Teresa: Yes.
Margaret: So it needn’t always be intense color, but indeed, a lot of the gardens in the book are pretty colorful. And so is the book as a result. And the design of the book itself, it has some sort of neon elements to it. It’s fun. And so color, bold color palettes. There was one, I think it was in upstate New York, I think it was in Buffalo maybe. The gardener, he didn’t only have incredible color going on the ground level in front of his house and so forth, but cascading from the second floor. Below the second-floor windows were like these extra-large window boxes just spilling over with plants that sort of mimicked what was on the ground. So it was like there was color up and down and all over the place. Do you know what I mean? It was multidimensional color.
Teresa: Yes. That is Jim Charlier’s home. And he has this charming Dutch colonial home and it’s painted, the trims are painted in purple and teal. And so he really leaned into some of those colors with his plant palette. And you’re right, his home is just maxed out with color, and it’s one of the favorites on the Garden Walk Buffalo tour. And his thing is to lean into more the colorful foliage plants like coleus and coral bells that come in all these different crazy colors for the leaves. And he uses those instead of as much flowers. I mean, he has flowers, but he really favors the colorful foliage. And I loved seeing how he just filled… I think he had a hundred containers and eight different pocket gardens. He just maxed out his small-space garden in a fabulous way with color.
Margaret: And so the containers, yeah, I remember that he had said he had a hundred of them. And so that in itself is a maximalist element or maximalist approach, to say: “Well, I’m not going to just have a vignette of three pots over there on the edge of the patio and two over there by the door. I’m going to go to the max on containers. I’m going to collect and curate containers in a way, too.” So it can be any element, our collection, so to speak, or what we’re curating, it can be anything, from colors to type of plants to vessels, the way we’re showcasing the plants. Lots of different tactics.
Teresa: Yes. And I think some people think maximalist means luxury, and it’s not approachable for everyone, but I think it can be. We saw a patio in San Francisco that had 300 pots on it, and it was beautifully curated. So I think that’s the fun thing with the containers. You can stack them on different levels. You can put bricks under them, you can put them on shelves and create this whole like stadium of plants on a back patio. So you can have a lot of fun with the maximalism, even in container gardens.
Margaret: And I think a lot of times one of us, a gardener, might have 20 pots, but they’re all over here and there. And the idea of aggregating them and making, like you say, a little stadium so to speak, or a real statement, maximalizing them, it’s kind of a fun thing to think about doing. And it’s just a different twist. We may already have them, but we’re not using them in that way.
Teresa: And Clarke de Mornay, he’s the gardener in San Francisco that has the small patio, but he would take advantage of a warm radiant wall to have more tropical plants. And he actually hung them on the wall, or he would cluster all of his sun-loving plants in one corner, but then have more of his shade-loving plants underneath some palms. So even on this pint-sized patio, he took advantage of all the microclimates and he artfully clustered some of these plants together. And his other trick was to use a consistent color theme for the pots. So his was more of an earth tone for all of his pots, and it really kind of unified his whole collection.
Margaret: There was another use of pots that really stood out for me in one of the photographs, and I’m not going to be able to remember, I don’t think, which one it was, but there was a path, a hardscape path, and on both sides of the path were beds. But before you got to the bed, adjacent to the path was a double row of pots on both sides. So it was like you were among these pots; the edging was pots, two deep [laughter].
Teresa: It was, that’s Jared Hughes, and he collects quite a lot of succulents and cacti, and his favorite pot for that is terracotta. But it gave this consistent look, lining his path with dozens of these small clay terracotta pots and his charming succulent collection. He has a lot of oddball things, and it’s quite a statement for people that arrive and walk this front path lined with these crazy succulents in all these terracotta pots. It’s wonderful. So that’s another thing, just use one kind of pot to bring the whole collection together.
Margaret: And what better way to show off a collection than to position it, to curate it, as you just said, but then also to position it on your most-traveled path? [Laughter.] You know what I mean? To use it as your edging, because everyone who comes and goes and comes and goes and is going to see your collection. So again, if it were out in the outback in the back 40, here and there, a few over here, a few over there, it doesn’t have the impact.
Teresa: That’s so true. These are really the stars for him, and he puts them right out front for everybody to enjoy.
Margaret: Yeah, that was fun; that was a really fun idea, I thought. Yeah, so some people have collections, like there is a particular kind of plant or a particular color, but especially this particular kind of plant. There’s one person in the book with a lot of moss, and I think they were in pots, too. A lot of the moss were like mini moss gardens in pots. There’s a theme that’s then maxed out. So that’s another way you could go, I mean, is that a particular type of plant could be repeated and repeated and repeated, yes?
Teresa: Yes. So there was a Dale Sievert’s garden in Wisconsin is all moss [photo, top of page], and he was a world traveler, quite an adventuresome person, and he didn’t discover moss until age 62 and just fell in love with it. And now he has his garden covered with mosses. He has 700 covered rocks with mosses, and 300 moss bowls. So he’d really maxed out on one species of plants, and even now in his travels, he loves to visit moss gardens all over the world. So he’s a very interesting guy. And his moss garden just is such a peaceful place to visit, with this all-green space. And he’s just, he has this overzealous joy for moss. He gets excited when he sprays the moss with a hose and it all turns green like in an instant. So it was fun to meet him and see his passion for one kind of plant.
Margaret: Yeah, and as you said, it’s so peaceful. I mean, they have that mounding, sensuous… there’s not spiky or jaggedy elements to moss. It’s that it’s soft and it’s sensual, and often seen in a sort of mounted surface on top of the bowl or the pot or whatever. It’s very sensual and very peaceful.
Teresa: And he encourages you to slow down when you come to his garden. I think a lot of people, when they tour a garden, they just kind of take the path through in one side out the other, and you really have to slow down and observe in his garden, because there’s carpet mosses and then there’s also very tight mosses, or you can also see the seeds, or not the seeds, but-
Margaret: The spores?
Teresa: Yes. Thank you, Margaret. And so you can notice all those details in his garden when you slow down and just observe.
Margaret: Yeah, sort of in contrast, there was a garden, I believe it was in Indiana that was just tropical abundance, even though it was Indiana [laughter]. And so in all the beds were like the red Abyssinian banana sort of erupting, and amaranths in that deep purple-y, reddish-maroon kind of color. And so there was this sort of color and tropical collection theme thing going on as well.
Teresa: That’s Irvin Etienne’s garden. And he lives outside of Indianapolis. And we drove past cornfields and soybean fields, and we arrived and you see all these tropicals. There’s a big banana tree when you pull in the driveway [laughter] and there’s cannas and golden sumac and elephant ears. And it just seems so oddly, surprisingly juxtaposed with this backdrop of old farm buildings and an old barn and cornfields. It was such a fun, surprising contrast. And Irvin, he just has a real flair for drama. And this definitely has a dramatic flair by contrasting and surprising the visitor, because it’s so unexpected to see this in rural Indiana.
Margaret: And it really, from the pictures, it seemed like it really spoke to the power of repetition, like to pick that amaranth–I don’t know which one it was particularly, but again, it was one of the dark-colored ones, that maroon-purple kind of color, wine color or whatever, and large in stature–and not to use one or two, but to have them dotted around so that you’re feeling like you are in a place where they live. Do you know what I mean? I love the repeat thing.
Teresa: So true. And he is a master at that; very humble, but he has a real flair for combining bold colors. So he would put that amaranth, that burgundy amaranth, but he would place it alongside a lot of chartreuse things, whether it was this golden sumac, or he also had a golden pokeweed, which was really kind of surprising to me because I consider that a weed. But he had a cultivar of it that was this bright gold and it looked fabulous, cut in flower arrangements. And just the surprising contrast that he would put these two together, the gold and the red in such a bold, dramatic way. And he repeated them, as you said, to a great effect-
Margaret: And not symmetrically, but like very spontaneous. It looked like they all sowed around here and there, but it just hung together. It was just lovely. That golden pokeweed: I love pokeweed and let a couple of big plants grow up here, and I forgot there was a golden one. And now of course, I really want it [laughter]. It’s so gorgeous.
Teresa: And it made you appreciate it, too, because Irvin has to take all of these indoors over winter, so it’s not an easy garden to do, but he does it because he loves it. And so he bags them up and-
Margaret: His bananas, and he has to collect the seed from the amaranth or whatever, get that started again and so on and so forth.
Teresa: It’s not an easy garden, but he embraces it. And he’s a big fan of Dolly Parton, and she’s very big and bold, and that’s what Irvin likes.
Margaret: Yeah. Earlier you mentioned the all-green of the moss, and there was another all-green garden that was really about sort of shapes, sculptural shapes. It’s a garden that I remember from a million years ago, and I hadn’t seen pictures of it in recent years. And boy, it’s looking great. In New Jersey, in Nutley, New Jersey, I think.
Teresa: Yes. That’s Graeme Hardie and Silas Mountsier’s garden in Nutley. And it is on the Open Days tour if people ever want to go see it. But it’s a very sculptural, shapely garden. And it really underscored to me the importance of scale, because this property has some grand trees. And they worked with Richard Hartlage on the design, and he said, this property calls for a grand scale in the garden design.
And so they put in these 160-foot mounds and they covered them all with Japanese forest grass, and they look like these big fuzzy caterpillars. You see them. But it shows, I think the impact that if you use one rather simple proven plant in multiples, it can have a grand effect. And it really did in their garden with these mounds. They also used hornbeams, and they had 14 hornbeams that they pruned, rectangular, and they’re probably 17 feet tall. So you have a very geometric garden. Graham calls it a sculptural or architectural garden. And it truly is, because you have these very cool shapes that the hornbeams form and these mounds. But like you said, it’s all green and it’s all about maxing out on shape and form in this garden.
Margaret: Yeah, it’s definitely… I mean, those hornbeams, they’re not cubes. They’re rectangular, but standing on end, but oh my goodness, they’re massive. And yeah, the pruning job alone must just be like, wow.
Teresa: They have a dedicated gardener and we got to meet him and see him in action. Boy, there really are pieces of sculpture that he transforms in the garden. And it also is a great backdrop, because Silas has a wonderful collection of art and sculpture that he displays in the garden. And so having this all green kind of sculptural garden is the perfect setting for his art as well.
Margaret: Yeah. So, sort of takeaways for people: If people think this sounds good, do you have any sort of first thoughts? I’ve kind of alluded to a few of the things that you have made me want to do, like group the pots differently this year, make more impact with things I’m maybe already doing, rethink them a little to heighten the impact. The color combination, that maroon-and-gold thing, that’s kind of my thing, too. And I wanted to immediately go out and buy all things in that color and really lay it on heavy this year. So are there places that people could sort of get started, do you think? Are there things that you’ve done that have upped the volume, kind of, in your own garden?
Teresa: Sure. I think a couple of things. One is to start off with containers, because that’s an easy place to max out. Start there. Then next, maybe go play with one area of your garden and see if you can max out a corner of a garden: layering, playing with layers, or playing with a succession of colors. Because we want spring colors, we want summer colors and fall. And if you layer for that, I think that seasonality, look at maybe how you can max out maybe just one corner of your garden and see how you like that.
Margaret: O.K. Well I’ve let the time get away from us, Teresa, but thank you or making time today.
(All photos by Bob Stefko, from the book “Garden to the Max.”)
enter to win a signed copy of ‘garden to the max’
I’LL SEND A signed copy of “Garden to the Max: Joyful, Visionary, Maximalist Design,” by Teresa Woodard, to one lucky reader. All you have to do to enter is answer this question in the comments box below:
Is there some element of your garden that you max out—or maybe are thinking about trying to, after listening to this interview?
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 April 8, 2025 at midnight. Good luck to all.
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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 March 31, 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).
