08/31/2025
One of my all time favorite garden installs! 🦘
I recently had the pleasure of working with two of the coolest clients who wanted to learn about natural and sustainable gardening through an assisted design and install package.
We spent time going through educational materials, tips and tricks, garden hacks, and all the complexities you can expect with a new garden. Once a design and colour palette was chosen for the space, everything really took off and the system began development!
For the plantings, I selected a regenerative permaculture mix supported by a foundation of Midwest and native North American plants. This approach is very intentional, as it allows for maximum benefit from both native and non-native vegetation.
I used a couple favourites in Holy Basil and Wormwood to serve as potent pest deterrents, and with the addition of alliums later on, the space will have complete pest coverage. This is complemented by a dynamic, insect-friendly environment. Holy Basil, or Tulsi as it is known, also makes one of the most delicious teas!
We used strategic deadscaping to create thousands of locations for beneficial insects to nest, reproduce, and hibernate in winter through the inclusion of logs and branches. These elements have also been inoculated with fungal spores and moss to enhance the ecosystem at both micro and macro levels, ensuring a thriving system from the smallest microbial space to the garden as a whole.
The plant mix is also carefully chosen to include self-sowing varieties. This means that as the clients expand greenscaping projects around their property, they’ll have a living seed bank ready to multiply their own stock, saving them thousands over time.
One of the final elements is the fact these systems are designed with rain garden functions.
The growing material is a custom-made bio-soil and activated mulch with incredibly high organic content, which essentially becomes a huge sponge. Because we also use deadwood strategically, the deadwood system acts as an irrigation sponge around the space, connecting and distributing irrigation throughout the system.
These are the results, which should give everyone confidence in how easy it is to set up a natural and sustainable garden that not only looks amazing but also incorporates incredibly sophisticated systems that make daily maintenance easier and more self-managing.
Proving it perfectly, when I came back 1 month later they had worked on and designed their own section using all of the principles they learned with me and on their own and smashed the project out of the park!
If you want your own natural garden with dynamic, sustainable systems installed, no matter the size of your project, whether it’s a small backyard, a rural property, or a large farm, we’ve got you covered!
