Your Natural Garden

By: Kelly D. Norris

Published by Cool Springs Press, 2025-01-14

<b>As featured in <i>The New York Times</i>, a valuable and artfully crafted guide to tending a naturalistic garden. </b><br><br>From plantsman Kelly Norris, author of <i>New Naturalism</i>, comes a <b>much-needed handbook to maintaining today’s natural gardens</b>. Naturalistic plantings, overflowing with biodiverse communities of plants, are filling front and backyards around the globe with colorful blooms, easy-care plants, and wildlife habitat. But caring for a naturalistic garden is vastly different than caring for a traditional home landscape of carefully manicured plants separated by mulch and regularly primped and pruned. In Y<i>our Natural Garden</i>, tending your garden properly means understanding its connection to the greater natural world and using <b>garden care methods that mimic nature instead of controlling it</b>.<br><br>Page by page, you’re guided through all the seasons of a naturalistic garden’s life and the tasks and to-dos that come with each of them. Including how to:<br><br><ul><li>Encourage and establish complexity in a new garden</li><li>Promote growth and variation by letting your plants self propagate</li><li>Determine when and what to edit, and when it’s best to let chaos rein</li><li>Decide if and when weeding is necessary</li><li>Foster the insects and other animals that rely on your plants</li><li>Understand succession in the naturalistic garden and why it’s important </li><li>Know when it’s time to cut back your garden and how to do it right</li></ul><br><b>Verdant photographs</b> accompany the text throughout, offering <b>examples of well-tended naturalistic plantings</b> and the tasks that are needed to properly care for them.