Starting a native, organic garden is a big step on the ecological gardening journey, and once you’ve made it that far, you’ll have even more questions than you did before. Garden designer Kelly Norris joins me to shed light on what comes next and discuss his new book, “Your Natural Garden.”
Kelly is a gifted writer and an incredible horticulturist who gardens in Des Moines, Iowa. He has both a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in horticulture from Iowa State University and is the former director of horticulture and education at the Greater Des Moines Botanical Garden. His earlier books include “ “New Naturalism,” “A Guide to Bearded Irises” and “Plants With Style.”
Garden designer Kelly Norris’s upcoming book is “Your Natural Garden: A Practical Guide to Caring for an Ecologically Vibrant Home Garden.” (Photo Courtesy of Kelly Norris)
“Your Natural Garden: A Practical Guide to Caring for an Ecologically Vibrant Home Garden,” will be published on January 14, 2025. In it, Kelly takes a deep dive into ecological gardening, helping us get our heads around what it really means at a deeper level. The book is organized into four sections: Place, Complexity, Legibility and Flow.
Ecological gardening is not hard, but it’s not as simple as we might think. There’s an art and a science to it, and some methodology to create the balance.
“Your Natural Garden” is the follow-up to Kelly’s 2021 book “New Naturalism.” He said it was clear when he came out with “New Naturalism” nearly four years ago that the conversation wasn’t done. He explains that while “New Naturalism” was largely a book about designing, planting and kicking off a new gardening adventure in ecological horticulture, life goes on, and a garden keeps growing. “A garden establishes, and it thrives, or it doesn’t,” he says. “What comes next?”
“Your Natural Garden” answers that question.
Kelly is finishing his seventh growing season at his home, Three Oaks Garden. He has designed gardens for others and has gone back to work on some of them over the course of several years, but this has been his first experience living with his own personal garden for an extended period.
“It’s where we live, but it’s also where we work and where we study, where we screw things up, and where we celebrate things that go really right,” he says.
It’s a place to test, explore and share, he says. “That attitude of sharing is what is behind the idea of ‘Your Natural Garden.’” The book is about reshaping the way you think about landscapes and how you interact with landscapes, he explains. His book editor, Jessica Walliser, would say to him that many great books are out there already that fit the existing mold of horticulture and traditional gardening, but “we need something that breaks the old mold and makes something new.”
Kelly writes in the book’s introduction: “What if a garden could be second nature to our way of life? A beautiful disturbance that celebrates place and grows largely on its own energy. What if a garden wasn’t just a product of human industry, but a place that supported life?”
Kelly advances the idea that there’s more to a garden than just planting some pretty flowers or a pleasing landscape.
Photo Courtesy of Kelly Norris
Ecological Gardening Is a Partnership
“So much of the way in which we’ve approached gardening in the Western world in the last 250 years is really focused on you, the gardener,” he says. “There’s a very human-centric idea about it.”
The notion is that if you go out and dig all the holes, pull all the weeds, and water all the things, you’ll have a successful garden.
“It’s very much about all the things you are doing as opposed to the life that’s already living around you,” he says. “And obviously, gardening requires some participation. It requires some effort and input.”
Ecological gardening is not hands-off with plants that are fully in the lead, he notes, but it’s a partnership between the gardener and the plants.
Kelly writes that a gardener can become a proxy for a keystone species — a species that is vital to the health of its ecosystem. The idea of a keystone species in ecology is that without that entity, the whole system starts to fall apart.
“Absent some element of human participation, the garden might dissolve or blur into something else,” Kelly says. “… Maybe in our little ecosystem that we’re living and creating and stewarding in our landscape around our home, we kind of become that organizing agent.”
Gardeners become the glue that holds things together and keeps things in orbit, while still trusting plants to self-perpetuate.
Three Oaks Garden, Kelly Norris’s home in Iowa. (Photo Courtesy of Kelly Norris)
Place
Kelly’s book references “Finite and Infinite Games,” a 1986 book on game mechanics by James P. Carse, who explains that there are games played to win that come to an end, and there are games played with the intention of continuing play indefinitely.
Ecological gardening is an infinite game, Kelly explains. The goal is to stay in the game.
“We want life to continue. We want complexity to continue. We want abundance to continue,” he says. “We want all of these things to stay in motion from one season to the next. And the things we do in one year do have consequences and effects on what happens the next year.”
It doesn’t take an expert to be an impactful ecological gardener.
“Even if you don’t have a degree in entomology or a degree in ornithology, and you can’t name the list of all the birds and insects running into your garden, the idea is that you can start with relatively smaller actions.” You can start by planting the plants that are native to your ecoregion. “Initiating that first little step can have a butterfly effect of results at orders of magnitude that you may not even totally understand,” he says.
“Place is more than just geography … it’s something I obsess about,” Kelly adds. “We describe our work to clients as a site-specific practice, and we want to understand the nature and the culture of places that we’re asked to work and to make landscapes in at a very intimate level.”
Kelly invites readers to ask themselves, “What is your goal?”
You can’t control certain factors, like how the atmosphere is today compared to 150 or 250 years ago, but you can restore the composition of plant communities to the way they used to be and plant abundantly.
Ecological gardening is a partnership between the gardener and plants. (Photo Courtesy of Kelly Norris)
Complexity
A natural garden is a complex place, and complexity is not our favorite thing, Kelly says. Humans like to simplify things. We like to reduce things to their lowest common denominators sometimes. Not for good or bad reasons, but just because it’s how our brains work. We have an incredible organ up there in our head, but it doesn’t operate very well when it starts to get overburdened by information
A natural garden is a very complex place, he says. It is a web of life, and there is no way that most of us could even begin to describe or name or understand the richness of the natural world that’s growing six feet out of our front doors.
Three Oaks includes at least 1,000 plant species on a half acre of glacial hard pan soil, Kelly says, with 85% of the species being native within 300 miles.
Even in a relatively standard, urban-suburban lot — a quarter acre or so — you can create and steward a vast mosaic of different habitats at different scales that can start to become home to not only just many kinds of plants, but many kinds of creatures that service and interact with those plants, Kelly says.
Not everyone has unlimited resources. Ripping half your lawn out to replace it with native plants can be a very expensive prospect if using 1-gallon plants for instant results. But a native garden can also be established with seed. And in between those options are plug trays.
“You don’t have to wait all that long,” Kelly says. “Many, many species planted from plugs, 12, 18 months later can start to deliver some pretty phenomenal results.”
If you do use 1-gallon plants, do your best to shake off as much of the soilless media that came in the nursery pot as you can. You want the roots to be in contact with the native soil to give the plants the greatest chance to become established and thrive.
The soilless media may also include unwanted weed seeds.
“It’s more time-consuming upfront, but gosh, it does save a lot of time down the line when all that weed seed that you’re importing into the site isn’t there,” Kelly says.
Kelly’s biggest piece of advice is “just keep planting.”
“Planting is probably the most impactful and meaningful act that we can undertake as a gardener because there is the most decision-making power associated with it,” he says. “We can decide to emplace a plant into an environment where it may not otherwise exist. We can do so with the best of intentions and the best of hopes and the best of reasoning, and by doing so, we’re adding yet another stitch of life to a place that needs it maybe so desperately.”
Planting gets us closer to the goal of supporting more pollinators and increasing biodiversity and abundance. Planting is the mile marker, one signpost at a time on that journey, he says.
Kelly Norris encourages gardeners to “just keep planting.” (Photo Courtesy of Kelly Norris)
Legibility
We like to read the landscape in a way that our brains don’t have to think too hard about.
Kelly says legibility is about, how do I read what I’m seeing? How do I see myself in that landscape? How do I create a landscape that says to other people, “Hey, I’m not crazy. I haven’t forgotten my landscape.” How do I use design and aesthetics as a communication tool that says “This is intentional.”
Kelly’s designs in his book scream legibility. All through the seasons, it just looks right. My mind sees the pattern, the rhythm, the flow, the harmony, the complementary design to it, and it just reads so well.
Kelly says we learn gardening in a certain way, and he doesn’t support throwing the baby out with the bathwater. In naturalistic gardening, the framework is the same while the content changes, he explains. While working with native plants, he still designs with respect to color, texture and form.
“We’re still thinking about the artful elements that excite us as the gardeners here or as designers,” he says.
Kelly offers five steps to develop your own style:
Discover Your Interest: When you read up on native plants in your ecoregion, you might become interested in key features and key plant groups that will become foundational to your design. Kelly recommends starting an experimental garden to make discoveries.
Translate Don’t Copy: “It’s easy in the world today to open up Instagram and, and see something you like and think, I’m gonna go find that plant. I’m gonna do that combination. I’m gonna plant by numbers 1, 2, 3, and it’s gonna be done,” Kelly says. He warns that that idea might have made a lot of sense where the photo was taken but doesn’t make sense in your location.
Experiment on a Small Scale: Before you go big, invest a little less and see how it turns out.
Repeat, Repeat, Repeat: If you have a good idea, you should repeat it to find out if it really was good, Kelly says. Maybe you just got lucky one time, or maybe it is a plant combination that is a true winner. When you find a winner, repeat, repeat, repeat.
Don’t Underestimate Your Efforts or the Time It Takes for an Idea to Develop: We’re all in a rush in life, but there is no timekeeper in a naturalistic garden. To get the look you were planning on, you may need to wait another season.
“We’re still thinking about the artful elements that excite us as the gardeners here or as designers,” Kelly Norris says. (Photo Courtesy of Kelly Norris)
Flow
“There is a lot of energy that is moving through the landscape at any one moment,” Kelly says. “And your job as a gardener is not to get in the way, and is not to disrupt that flow. It is, in fact, to foster it to the greatest extent that you possibly can.”
Kelly’s book shares how to tap into the flow.
Ecosystems have a natural flow. Kelly Norris shares how to tap into that flow. (Photo Courtesy of Kelly Norris)
I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Kelly Norris on “Your Natural Garden: A Practical Guide to Caring for an Ecologically Vibrant Home Garden.” If you haven’t listened yet, you can do so by scrolling to the top of the page and clicking the Play icon in the green bar under the page title.
How have you found success in your natural garden? Let us know about your experience in the comments below.
Links & Resources
Some product links in this guide are affiliate links. See full disclosure below.
Episode 071: Gardening for Wildlife: How-to Create an Inviting Habitat, with NWF’s David Mizijewski
Episode 072: Creating an Eco-friendly Garden & Landscape: 7 Key Tenets
Episode 077: The Beauty and Importance of Native Plants: The Ethos of Mt. Cuba Center
Episode 133: Native Plant Design in a Post-Wild World, with Thomas Rainer
Episode 152: The Native Plant Trust: Why Plant Choices Matter
Episode 197: The Many Benefits of Building a Naturalistic Garden, with Kelly Norris
joegardenerTV YouTube: 5 Key Steps for a Drought-Tolerant Landscape
joegardenerTV YouTube: How to Create a Wildlife-Friendly Habitat in Your Garden or Landscape
joegardener Online Gardening Academy™: Popular courses on gardening fundamentals; managing pests, diseases & weeds; seed starting and more.
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Organic Vegetable Gardening: My new premium online course. The course is designed to be a comprehensive guide to starting, growing, nurturing and harvesting your favorite vegetables, no matter what you love to eat, no matter where you live, no matter your level of gardening experience.
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Master Seed Starting: Everything you need to know to start your own plants from seed — indoors and out.
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Beginning Gardener Fundamentals: Essential principles to know to create a thriving garden.
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Growing Epic Tomatoes: Learn how to grow epic tomatoes with Joe Lamp’l and Craig LeHoullier.
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Master Pests, Diseases & Weeds: Learn the proactive steps to take to manage pests, diseases and weeds for a more successful garden with a lot less frustration. Just $47 for lifetime access!
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Perfect Soil Recipe Master Class: Learn how to create the perfect soil environment for thriving plants.
GGW Episode 906: Mt. Cuba Center: A Native Plant Public Garden Like None Other
GGW Episode 910: Working With Nature for a Sustainable Landscape Design
Kelly D. Norris on Instagram | @kellydnorris
“Your Natural Garden: A Practical Guide to Caring for an Ecologically Vibrant Home Garden” by Kelly Norris
“A Guide to Bearded Irises: Cultivating the Rainbow for Beginners and Enthusiasts” by Kelly Norris
“Plants With Style” by Kelly Norris
Milorganite® – Our podcast episode sponsor and Brand Partner of joegardener.com
Disclosure: Some product links in this guide are affiliate links, which means we get a commission if you purchase. However, none of the prices of these resources have been increased to compensate us, and compensation is not an influencing factor on their inclusion here. The selection of all items featured in this post and podcast was based solely on merit and in no way influenced by any affiliate or financial incentive, or contractual relationship. At the time of this writing, Joe Lamp’l has professional relationships with the following companies who may have products included in this post and podcast: Corona Tools, Milorganite, Soil3, Territorial Seed Company, Earth’s Ally, Proven Winners ColorChoice, Farmer’s Defense, Heirloom Roses and Dramm. These companies are either Brand Partners of joegardener.com and/or advertise on our website. However, we receive no additional compensation from the sales or promotion of their product through this guide. The inclusion of any products mentioned within this post is entirely independent and exclusive of any relationship.
