After horticulturalist Kelly D. Norris finished writing New Naturalism (the award-winning 2021 book now in its sixth printing), he didn’t have to think hard about what his next book project would be. Norris knew that he needed to follow it up with a how-to book of sorts. “It was clear that the conversation wasn’t over,” he says. “What happens after you’ve designed it and planted it? How is gardening different and how does your relationship to the landscape change?” Norris’s new book Your Natural Garden investigates all these questions and helps gardeners figure out why and how to cultivate and maintain an ecological garden. That said, this book is not your usual gardening handbook.
Your Natural Garden is as much a conceptual conversation as it is a manual of instructions. Faced with the challenge to provide how-to advice for gardeners in a wide range of zones, conditions, and aesthetic preferences, Norris avoids prescriptive step-by-step to-do’s and instead leans into thematic advice. The book is structured into four sections: Place, Complexity, Legibility, and Flow, and in place of conventional chapter structure, readers will find a series of mini-essays within each section. Norris says he wrote it this way because it’s how he reads books. “I am a notorious hen picker when I read, because I’m usually reading about 10 things at once,” he says. “I think about a book like a box of chocolates: You can open it up and read one little bit.”
Your Natural Garden is also bursting with photos of gorgeous, natural gardens. In fact, you could buy the book for the photos alone, but they are more than just window dressing for the practical advice. Most photography in the book is shot by Norris (much of it capturing his own designs). “The images reflect places that I’ve been and experiences that I’ve had in that way that I could directly connect to narratives I wanted to share in the manuscript,” he says. The result is a guide that is as inspiring as it is useful. Here are five lessons from Your Natural Garden.
Photography by Kelly D. Norris from Your Natural Garden (Cool Springs Press).
1. ‘Place’ comes first.
Norris intentionally started with “Place” because he believes gardeners need to get to know the greater natural landscape in which they garden in order to make informed choices about their maintenance. “We need to think about it from an ecological background,” says Norris. A deep knowledge of place is a necessary complement to Norris’s prompts.
