From away to garden.com and Robinhood Radio.com, this is Away to Garden with Margaret Roach. You're a weekly invitation to dig in and grow. The more that I see photographs of gravel gardens and the more that I learn about this gardening style, which besides its distinctive aesthetic appeal promises to be water wise and weed suppressing, the more

I want to give it a try. So I was happy to get an early copy of The Gravel Garden, a book

that's due out in June, and be treated to virtual walks through 20 such landscapes in a range of

sizes and styles. The book's co-author, Jeff Epping, who has been making gravel gardens for

clients since 2008, and converted his own Wisconsin front yard from lawn to gravel in 2017, is here to talk about what kinds of plants work in these resilient gardens and provide us with some design inspiration too. So, more in a moment but first, these messages. Underwriting support for a way to garden provided by Colorblends wholesale flower bulbs, a third-generation bulb company offering top-sized flower bulbs directly to landscape professionals and ambitious residential gardeners on the web, Colorblends.com. And by High Moeng Seeds, Wolcott Vermont, Professional Quality Vegetable, Flower, and Urbal Seeds that are 100% organic and non-GMO project verified. On the web, highmoingseeds.com and by White Flower Farm offering a wide range of carefully selected and expertly grown garden plants. On the web, whiteflower farm.com. My guest today is Jeff Epping a long time horticulturist and garden designer who for 28 years was director of horticulture at Ulbrich Botanical Gardens in Madison, Wisconsin. Jeff's upcoming book is called The Gravel Garden, Visionary, Draught Defying Naturalistic Designs written in collaboration with Teresa Woodard. It takes us around the country into the UK and Germany too to look at how various garden makers have interpreted the technique of gravel gardening

And I'm so glad to welcome him back to the program today. How are you? Great. Thanks for having me back all the way from Wisconsin. Hey all the way from Wisconsin. Where one day it's 90 in the next day It's frost warnings. Oh, you must live here Yeah, right. Oh my guess,, congratulations on the book. We'll have a book giveaway with the transcript of the show over on a way to garden.com. And I've been enjoying it because it's as I said in the introduction, it's been kind of like making me think, huh, maybe I could do that over here, over here because not all gravel gardens are created equal. There's a lot of possibilities. And, um, about lawn alternatives and you know, oh, put a meadow in your front yard and so forth, but you put a gravel garden in yours. So it can be an ecological solution too, even a lawn alternative, yes? Yeah, absolutely. I always say that a lawn space is probably the best place for a gravel garden because they do well in full sun where the best lawns do as well. And we have so much of lawn that there's always an opportunity for a gravel garden. And it can start out as small as you want. I mean three by three or you know really really big.

I like a three acre gravel garden that we cover in the book at Epic System. So the beauty of them is that they are so climate resilient and in this day and age of this crazy climate change. And water being so precious and all of us needing to think about how we how we utilize that. Now is the time I think for us to think about all different types of drought targ gardens. And then I do design meadows as you mentioned, but I have never worked with designed, maintain the garden that's been easier to maintain and more in tune with Mother Nature and what Mother Nature provides than gravel gardens. And that's really has something I just started out thinking, oh, this is kind of cool to like, wow, this is really something that we should be promoting. So, so here we are. Right. I never thought I'd do. Right. And in the new book you say, basically, gravel gardening is a technique in which deep-rooted drought tolerant perennials are planted in about a six-centile layer of gravel that suppresses weeds and conserves water. So that's the very simplest description. About four years ago when you and I collaborated on a New York Times Garden column and we also did a podcast together, we talked about sort of the how-to of making gravel garden and I'm going to link again with the transcript of this conversation to that because people can get some of the how-to inspiration. But I wanted to talk today about kind of what you were just hinting at. You know, there's such a diversity of possibilities both in scale and in style and it's not just that sort of I I don't know, I think at first I thought, oh, you must meet an Alpine, you know, a garden of Alpine plants or something, right? When you say gravel garden. Right, and I think it's what, yeah, people think of as a rock garden, an Alpine garden, but it's not really that at all. Right. So, yeah, and to show us that show us that it's not, you take us to these 20 gardens in the US and elsewhere and we could even start just as a small, with a small trough, couldn't we, a trough garden? I think there are trough gardens in the book. Yes, absolutely. The small is a trough, so if you're in an apartment or a condo or something and you just want to give the concept to try you could do something like that or we even converted a somewhat derelict very leaky three tiered fountain that the city of Madison water utility was looking to hopefully do something with otherwise they were going to jackhammer out, which is a lot of work and a lot of energy. And so they called me and we created this magnificent. I thought, I think gravel garden, it's in the book. You could be the judge, but it, you know, it's only 18 inches deep. And when you put five inches of gravel, that doesn't give you a lot of soil. But I'll be honest with you, it's one of the finest gravel gardens I've worked with personally. And of course, in the book, we, we, we, we, like you say, feature 20 and it's really cool to see what everybody's doing. And we don't all do it exactly the same way either, but the, the basic components are there, right? The gravel being typically several inches, if not even up almost the foot deep like Sean Conway's Garden and Rhode Island. So yeah, it's really a lot of fun. Yeah. And, I guess, once you get a mustache, it's work up front. Don't get me wrong because you have to do a few different things and have that gravel brought in And create that but once you do that then you're then you're on cruise control for the right So you just mentioned Sean Conway in Rhode Island and and so you know There's that stereotype gravel garden sort of we think it's anonymous maybe with alpine-ish looking or rock garden looking. But then there's someone like Sean Conway in Rhode Island in the book, and he incorporates formally clipped hornbeam. I know they're almost like topiaries. They're like these barrel-shaped, clipped, barrel-shaped topiaries for things on top of the trunk up on the trunk and elevated sort of floating and a clipped purple beach hedge. So it's not just that other stereotype. So I thought maybe we could just talk about some of the extremes and examples. I mean, some are very romantic looking, not stark at all, not harsh at all. And that's right. Yeah. Sean's Garden, prior, was a vegetable garden. And it was actually a set for the gardening show that he used to have. And when the show ran its course and they were done, he said, I just can't maintain this giant vegetable garden anymore and he was inspired by the work of Lisa Roper at Shantaclared, who we featured in the book as well. Wonderful wonderful wonderful. Oh, it's amazing right and and he said, I'm going to try this. So he just tried a little, a little corner and was so

amazed at the results that he, he took it to another level. And he has these beautiful, clipped beach hedge. And like you mentioned, the, the marines, the horn beans, yeah. And very, very clean, edgy and such. So a lot of times people have, you know this, but have a little bit of a hard time accepting these naturalistic style gardens. And so these cues for care, as they say, help people accept the wildness to the garden. And that is repeated in most of the gardens that we photograph for the book, which is pretty neat. So to have some element that says this is a garden, someone is maintaining this, someone has put their touches on it, so to speak. It's something like his clipped edges and his sort of

topiariish horn beams and so forth that alert you to. It's not just a wild space, yeah? Exactly. And Kali Norris created a beautiful garden in Ames, Iowa for Adam a Kraken and Anna wanted sort of an old to the prairie and so Kelly and being the incredible designer that he is created such a garden and mostly native perennial plants and very wild and nature but again used tailor junipers. So our native junipers for Janina and tailor though is very formal looking central leader, very upright, looks like it's clipped, but it really isn't. And he used those along with some artwork in the garden and such and pulled it off beautifully. It's such a gorgeous garden. And Joe Nassauer is the professor of landscape architecture at the University of Michigan who coined this term, queues for care or messy ecosystems order frames. So like you say, I hedge around something or even a nicely edged on around a more wild landscape really helps people. It really does. And it can be as simple as a very large vessel of something, like a very, very, very large, almost sculptural pot or something, on access somewhere that draws your eye. I mean, it sort of changes the whole thing from a wild space to, oh, someone's been here and thought this through, yeah? Exactly, exactly. And oftentimes they have sculpture in the garden, like it right in gardens and, and in Ames as well, that we feature they have some like really nice sculptures in there and yeah it's it varies but it it shows that somebody is paying attention somebody is caring for that garden. Yeah at Obrich where you worked for many years the botanical gardens there there are four gravel gardens I think think. And one is like a 5,000 square foot entry garden. And one is like, at first when I looked at the picture in the book, it's like a long border along a path. And the path isn't down, we can think gravel. Maybe like a mulchy kind of path or a dirt path. But a long, long, long border, it almost looks like the scale of a border

where you do the old style sort of bedding out and I think it used to maybe have annuals in it or something. Yeah, exactly. Each year and be changed over as a sort of display element. And now it's this long, long, long, perennial border, but it's a gravel garden. Yeah, and it's front and center. That's right there along, you know, the main road that takes you by the garden.

And you're right.

When I first started at Obrich It was always annuals and it was beautiful But you know, there's a lot of energy that goes into such a big border like that And so that we did two things there was a big olon panel of bluegrass turf and we converted that to a prairie drop seed meadow. And mainly green, but then we added more color to it over time. And then we changed that big annual border into a gravel garden. And it really has been successful. And I really wanted to have it front and center so that people could see that there's other possibilities as they were driving by other than lawn and, on and more on, right? And so... Right. Right. Yeah, and then we took it to the next level with the entrance garden. That's right there at the main entrance to the to Old Rick. And that again was a very sort of seventies landscape with day lilies and in pack of sand and all sorts of the common things and we blew it up and put in a big big old gravel garden and showed that This is what we're trying to do at Olbrich trying to be more environmentally friendly and so it's a great great entrance to to the rest of the garden So yeah, so a couple of times you've mentioned kind of prairie plants the palette of plants being plants being kind of prairie oriented or whatever and you know grasses and forbs, you know flowering perennials and so forth. And so again, it's not just all rock garden plants quote unquote. There's a wide range of plants represented in the gardens in this book. and but prairie plants do well. And I guess that's because they are drought tolerant. And that little definition that I read from the book earlier on that one of the sort of characterizations is that it's in which deep rooted drought tolerant perennials are planted. We're looking for things that are tolerant of drought and root themselves in deeply, yes. Yeah, because, you know, again, we have that thick layer of gravel. And so, and I experimented with all sorts of different plants when I first started doing this. And though there are a lot of drought tolerant perennials, they don't necessarily have the root systems. So like out many of the Alpine plants, they have widespread in root systems, or they're just good at rooting in and maintaining with a shell root system. And so I tried things like creeping sedums, which you think, oh, sedums, they're the most drought tolerant of any perennial. And all the creeping types faded away within three years, because they couldn't get roots down deep enough. Okay. So, we're looking at plants that have a deeper root system. And yes, the prairie plants are the stars, and there's many, many of those that work perfectly, though there's wet purries too, so those species don't, but things

like Calamant, the non-seeding Calamant, Calamant, the Nepheta subspecies, Nepheta are called the varcane, called mantros white, super drought tolerant and just a great perennial for the gravel garden. Whereas Margaret, I always think of Nepetta or Cat-Ment is being, you know, super drought-tonna, right? And so it is, but not in a gravel garden. It doesn't root deep enough. And so I learned soon after planting many of them that they just in last. So I made a lot of mistakes along the way, but I've figured out what works and what doesn't. And the beauty with the book was we we saw plants out of our zone, because we traveled to the east coast. We even went down to Texas, see the work of Jared Barnes, Dr. Dr. Jared. And so those plants, you know, work extremely well, but not hardy enough for us in Wisconsin. So it's, yeah, it's, it was fun to see, and the palette is pretty vast, actually, of what you might be able to use, for sure. There were bulbs in a number of, of pictures in the book. And so they can root in deep enough. I mean, they're planted under the bulb itself is placed lower in. And then so then the roots can get down to the subsoil or whatever we call it beneath the gravel, I guess, because it bulb all seemed to show up in a number of places. Yeah, you know, we featured, we did a little, so in each of the chapters, we kind of feature something unique about that garden. And the garden we talked mostly about bulbs was Shantyclare. Yeah. Because Lisa Roper has been doing fantastic work with bulbs. And many of the bulbs that we use, you know, in our gardens are actually native to rocky, mountainous areas like Turkey and such. And when we put them in our rich, organic soils, a lot of them don't last because it's too moist when they're dormant. And they get boat tritus and other diseases that, you know, they rot off. But in the gravel garden, we're not watering to any degree after it's established or at all. And the bulbs love it because they're just sitting there baking in that soil below. It shouldn't say baking, they're not hot, but but they're dry. And that's what they write. And they come back year after year. A lot of the species tulips are just absolutely gorgeous. But that for those work and all the bulbs that we've tried and I've seen in the gardens that not only we photograph, but I see because we photographed

you know during the growing season mainly. So Lisa was kind enough to share photographs. She's an excellent photographer of her garden in the spring. She has alliums I think in some spots and lots of other things. Yeah, and allium, canadaxo work well. I guess all the different and daffodils, two ups for me at home, not so good, not because they're not well adapted, it's because the rabbits love them. So the pain of my existence. You mean a number of other good, isn't it? Anyway, they amazing. And also, yeah, you mentioned alliums. And of course, there's the preneural alliums, like summer beauty and millennium in that group, which do grading gradients. But there's also the big, you know, the ball shaped alliums that come up and then go to like purple sensation. And Adam Glossett, Swarthmore College, has a fantastic display of purple sensation aliens in their roundabout, which is a fun application for a gravel garden. Yeah, no, it was so so so that was interesting because again, it's not just the plants you might think. It's a wider palette.

What about, so what about some of the, you know, I think of herbs as being

like in good drainage, I would just speak, but maybe their roots aren't going to go deep enough, so probably they wouldn't be a lot of be like a lavender does does well. Oh, oh, okay. Yeah. Now for us it's a little touchy because we're a little farther north but sure a lot of new cultivars out there now that we're experimenting with but again they like it dry and so they they yeah they do well. I'm sure if I was warm enough ros Rosemary would do quite well. I use here, I can use the ornamental oregano, like Heronhausen, or I think it translates to Manorhouse, or Gainham, is a great gravel garden plant. And so yeah, there's quite a number of sort of Mediterranean herbs that can do quite well. It's, again, more about the hardiness, I think. I remember there was a story in the book about one gardener in Pennsylvania, who met a book farm in Pennsylvania. I think his name is Glenn Ashton, he had Gardner there. And he had to relocate some prickly paracactus when your fence was gonna be installed. But instead of just sort of say, I gotta get these out of here and move them for the construction and I'm gonna put them over here. It was like the impetus for making a gravel garden and they became a feature. So that's another plant. So depending on where one lives and I mean,

but that's another plant that a group of plants, right? Oh, for sure. Yeah. And, and Gland is he is just a hoot. I mean, he's the funniest guy, most passionate gardener. and yeah he he piled up all sorts of gravel to create good drainage and he's

actually growing choirs which I've only seen you know growing down in the southwestern part of the bay. It's in Glans grownum in Pennsylvania. Yeah he's like making these micro you know I don't know what you would call it like he's little habitats, he's like microcosmic little habitats because he's also gravel.

Yeah, no, it's great.

Yeah, yeah.

And agave is, you know, things, things that, you know, I can't grow here for the life of me, but it's so fun to see. And of course, they're super well adapted, right? And they don't have to water them. In fact, he's making the drainage 10 times better so that you can keep him alive so

they're not too wet.

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