Your Next Great Garden Read
Benjamin Vogt’s new book, Prairie Up, gives gardeners essential information for using native plants in their landscapes. This practical introduction to natural garden design has hit the shelves to rave reviews:
- Publisher’s Weekly says it’s “a solid primer on gardening with nature [that’s] realistic [and is a] great starting point.”
- Author Nancy Lawson adds: “many gardening books attempt to take the mystery out of growing plants, providing cookie-cutter recommendations that are ultimately unattainable and unsustainable. Prairie Up does the opposite, celebrating the mysteries and unpredictability of ecological gardens while providing heaps of down-to-earth advice for nurturing these ever-evolving landscapes.”
- Dr. Doug Tallamy goes further: “Vogt's text is a cookbook for prairie restoration featuring unparalleled lists of which plants to use, in what combinations, and under what conditions. This how-to knowledge draws from Vogt’s own experience designing and maintaining suburban gardens. This type of experience is priceless!"
Benjamin is a regular blogger for Izel Native Plants, so we talked to him directly to find out what all the buzz is about. We hope you enjoy this conversation and gain insights to use for your spring garden plans.
You’ve written before on the importance of native plants and natural design in A New Garden Ethic: Cultivating Defiant Compassion for an Uncertain Future. How is Prairie Up different, or, what does it add to the conversation?
I see A New Garden Ethic as the why. It’s the deep philosophy behind natural garden design in a time of climate change and mass extinction. On the other hand, Prairie Up is the how, and it’s much more approachable and geared toward folks new to natural garden design using native plants. What that means is there’s a lot of detail on how to garden differently than we’re used to, and a lot of practical methodology that’s not seen elsewhere in most garden books. Combined, I think my two books carry an empowering 1-2 punch to make a difference in whatever landscape you are stewarding.
The title of this new book might be misleading, especially since not everyone may live in a region that historically or currently has prairie ecosystems. How is this book applicable to people outside the Great Plains or Midwest? How is this book different from others?
Prairie is everywhere – I discuss those places at the beginning of the book from the Piedmont to Texas coastal grasslands to longleaf pine savannas of the southeast to California grasslands and the Palouse of the Pacific northwest. Besides, much of the wildlife that depend on the prairie / meadow ecosystem and plants are still among us. There’s prairie and meadow and grassland and savanna in every state. And even if you don’t live in an ecoregion full of meadow, it’s likely you live in a highly disturbed environment that needs to be healed, and that’s where prairie-style planting comes in. It's an early successional plant community that helps mend the site by rebuilding the soil and various food webs, eventually giving way to forest, for example.
This book also doesn’t shy away from how complicated and difficult natural garden design can be, because you’re thinking about a ton of variables beyond “oh, this plant looks pretty I think I’ll buy it.” So Prairie Up takes things very realistically, which is a bit more uncommon in garden books or articles that wear rose-colored glasses. No pulled punches here – we even explore the nitty gritty and highly charged conversations about different methods of site prep and working with local weed ordinances or HOAs.
At the core of Prairie Up is this idea that we need to get away from traditional design and management, letting plants lead the way. Could you discuss this a bit more? What does that actually look like?
I like to select plants based on their role within the larger community they’ll be a part of, then let them be themselves by guiding where they want to be. Overall, this means three things: choosing plants for each layer, choosing plants that all grow in the same site conditions in the wild, and choosing plants based on their sociability. That last point means harnessing a plant’s natural tendencies to fill in the space or create succession, which leads to site stability and resilience. In other words, we’re letting plants fulfill their entire lifecycle and seeing what happens. It’s more responsive and more in tune with the landscape’s vibes, instead of the high-stress maintenance calendar of prune at this time or plant at this time – there’s no one-size-fits-all to gardening, and the sooner we realize that, the healthier the garden will be.
Traditional design is also all about plants marooned far apart from one another in a bed of perpetual mulch, lined up like soldiers at review, never allowed to touch or trusted to spread and compete against weeds, keep soil in place, and increase soil moisture through shade. We’ve got to let plants be plants! Plants are social creatures – knowing which ones are gregarious and which ones are shy can lead to a really cool, cohesive, and dynamic party we won’t soon forget.
How can folks design a garden that’s both ecologically vibrant, celebrating local native plant communities, and welcoming to neighbors who would otherwise be tempted to call municipal authorities about weeds?
In our design practice we focus on shorter and generally more well-behaved plants, especially for front yard lawn-to-meadow conversions. We still practice a few traditional garden design tenets such as tiers, massing, and bloom succession week to week and season to season. Making sure nothing flops over into a sidewalk or impedes sightlines on a street corner is critical, too.
As for appeasing neighbors, cues to care are important and can include hardscape features such as benches or sculptures, as well as lawn paths or architectural shrubs and trees. I often tell folks that sometimes the research, planning, and installing is the easy part – once the garden is in it’s up to all of us to advocate for it. A natural landscape is going to stand out in a traditional urban or suburban neighborhood, but that’s also part of the point. These landscapes are part activism for all species and part joy of abundance and life and color.
I’ll say this, and get in some trouble – most native plant gardens I see really ARE weedy or messy looking, and this is in large part because aggressive plants were chosen for a small area, the plants are too tall, there’s not enough density so plants flop over, and there’s no repetition of masses like you’d see in a meadow. Also, we gardeners tend to be plant collectors, and sometimes you can simply have too much variety when less is more. It’s a hard balance to strike between ecosystem function and aesthetics, but it’s so important if we want to win folks over. We can’t ignore design. And thinking like designers does not take away from ecosystem function or habitat.
The most important aspect to natural garden design is researching plants. Nothing can replace the experience that plants will teach you once in the ground, but if you don’t learn about their baselines beforehand, you may be setting yourself up for more angst than you need to. I’m looking at you, aggressive species like Sorghastrum nutans, Asclepias syriaca, and Solidago canadensis. There are cousins of these plants that are much better suited for smaller urban lots.
What has changed most in your thinking or design practice over the years? Or, where has been the biggest shift in your approach to converting urban lawns to more natural spaces?
I haven’t always used enough plants. You can’t have too many plants (although you can have too many species, especially in the upper, showier layers). Which is why plugs are so important – more bang for your buck. The goal is always to cover the ground as quickly as possible, and generally within about one year after installation. Sometimes we mix plugs with seeds, but in an ideal world we’re planting on 12-inch centers or less, often using a matrix of sedge or bunchgrasses in which go masses and drifts of forbs.
I’ve also started using more wood mulch on projects where we use 100% plugs. So we may spray kill the lawn, then put down 1-2” of wood mulch, then plant straight into all of that. The less disturbance we have, the better for weed control, and while the wood mulch helps keep down some annual weeds like crabgrass or foxtail, it can also help neighbors see intention early on. Everyone knows wood mulch means garden bed thoughtfulness.
What’s the hardest aspect for folks new to natural garden design?
Taking the time to research plants via trusted books and websites. One adage goes to dig a $10 hole for a $1 plant, but another should be to spend 10 minutes (or 30) researching one plant. Getting a general consensus from multiple sources on how the plant grows, reproduces, and the site conditions it does best in for your region is critical – and it’s empowering as the process builds your confidence.
Natural design also means an end to helicopter gardening. We try to let the plant guide the management as they move around, fill in, or even vanish. They can tell us a lot about what’s working on the site and what plants in the community may be helpful or hindering. We also don’t need to – and shouldn’t – pull every weed we see. Stand back. Let the landscape garden you a bit more.
One of the most interesting sections is the rather candid Q&A section that discusses such topics as butterfly bush, honey bees, ticks, snakes, thistles, allergies, and even best tools to use. What topic do you find folks most struggle with in rethinking their garden’s design? Or, what topic creates the most debate?
I’d say the topic that creates the most debate right now isn’t even in the last section, but appears over several pages midway through the book – and that’s on using glyphosate to prep an area for planting. I get criticism from native plant enthusiasts who say using glyphosate is anathema to a natural garden.
But it isn’t. It’s a useful tool, just as it’s a useful tool for large-scale habitat managers keeping invasive species at bay. We often use it just once – to kill a pristine lawn. By using it we’ve reduced site disturbance by 90%, which means fewer weeds, and the dead lawn acts as a great mulch or even erosion control blanket. Over large areas solarizing and lasagna mulching with cardboard is impractical and takes far too long, and each has its own issues (plastic waste and baking soil life with the former, and basically suffocating the soil with the latter). I’m not a super fan of using the only chemical we ever use, but from a cost and time point of view it’s useful. And if you have a bad back or bad knees, it’s a lifesaver.
But there’s also lots of chatter about ticks. The problem here is that we’ve so homogenized landscapes that ticks thrive more. There are fewer owls and foxes to eat white-footed mice, for example, who are key vectors for Lyme disease. We’ve stopped fires in grasslands and woodlands, and fires kill ticks while opening up sunlight, making conditions less moist and conducive to ticks. At home, we can have 6’-wide paths to avoid brushing against ticks questing on the tips of leaves and branches, and as in any outdoor setting from a campsite to a picnic site, we should be spraying ourselves down – especially as human-caused climate change increases tick spread and habitat. But ultimately, nature has far more mental and physical benefits than the negative roadblocks we like to set up – and we need far more nature in our daily lives, at school, work, and home.
Signed copies of Benjamin Vogt's books can be purchased on his website.
Benjamin Vogt owns Monarch Gardens LLC, a prairie-inspired design firm based in Nebraska. His work has been featured in The American Gardener, Dwell, Fine Gardening, Horticulture, Midwest Living, and The Wall Street Journal. Through Monarch Gardens, Benjamin offers online classes, webinars, and gardening pocket guides, as well as a blog and newsletter.
