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. Though what plant goes where aspect of gardening is the hardest part for a lot of us, and as we increasingly shift our plant palette and gardening style to more native and ecologically-focused, decisions about design might even seem a little trickier. We want our landscape to be abundant and biodiverse packed with life, but also to still hang together visually. We want it to be legible, and today's guest landscape designer Leslie Needham has advised to help us achieve that legibility to make our gardens really read and draw the eye and the visor through them effectively. 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

Urbel seeds that are 100% organic and non-GMO project verified. On the web, HighMoengCedes.com. And by White Flowerflower Farm offering a wide range of carefully selected and expertly grown garden plants on the web, Whiteflower Farm.com. Leslie Needham is the founder of Leslie Needham Design in Bedford, New York, a 20-year-old landscape firm and has also taught landscape design at the New York Botanical Garden Landscape Design Program where she was accredited. Just this year, Leslie was one of the featured presenters in the 12-week, Less Lawn More Life Challenge that will tell you a little bit about in a minute. Just another of the many ways she shares her knowledge and tactical advice from making gardens that work both ecologically and aesthetically. Welcome, Leslie. I'm so glad to talk about this today. I'm Margaret.

It's great to be with you.

Yeah, so I was glad to have a chance to get better acquainted with you recently when I was writing a New York Times story about the less-lawn, more-life challenge that I was just referring to in the introduction. Sort of a digital self-test in a little bit a curriculum, a 12 weeks, self-help, self-instribution, of course from this company called Planet

Wild.

And I can give information about that, including a link to your video that you did one of the weeks with the transcript of the show over on away to garden.com, but that was kind of fun, it was great to connect and get some advice from you. And I wanted more, and that's why we're here today. Great, yeah. You know, it is fun. I have to say, I think the whole planet wild tutorial and the 12 steps has been really engaging and it does make it fun and approachable and I think that's the whole goal of all this. And there's just a really great cast of collaborators involved at Homegrown National Park, Octalamus group, and wild ones, the venerable membership group around the country and lots of pollinator partnership and so forth, lots of other impressive groups involved. So yeah, and we'll tell everybody about it, but not to derel into that, just to say that I was glad that that connected us lastly. Indeed. So your topic in that challenge, and that 12-week challenge was legibility. So what makes a garden beautiful and what makes it hang together? It's sort of been shifting in recent years, hasn't it? It is, and I think that's what's really exciting. I would say the paradigm of what constitutes a beautiful garden is very different, you know, from when I first started gardening at my house 23 years ago. I think people appreciate the fact that you're not just planting for yourself. You're really, you know, when you bring a plant into a garden now, so many people think, OK, I think it's beautiful, but is it also gonna feed the local birds, the local bugs? Is it gonna be part of my larger ecosystem? And I think that's really exciting. And you see that in the plant offerings as well. I mean, there's so many incredible sources for native plug plants. So it's been a really exciting shift, yes. Yes. So I guess I'll I'll just say, where do we start? Because I want to get lots of your tips, but it's fall approaching. And I also think of that as a really good time to kind of take stock, look around, walk around your garden, take some notes, et cetera, especially for those of us who don't remember to take notes when things happened during the year. Yeah, I think I totally agree with you. I think fall is a really great time and you know what, if you don't take notes but the great thing is when you have, when you move to a wilder landscape, a more nature-based, there's so much more to observe. I mean, beyond the plants, you bring in so so much wildlife both in like the small bugs and the birds but also animals that are making habitat. So I think falls a really great time to walk around and see you know well is is it anyone else in here and you will start to see like I'm seeing well they're the migrating birds now but you know a month ago the finches moved into an area where I planted so much more echinacea. So I make those observations. Also, observe like, oh, this looks good, and this seems to be working, or maybe that plant hasn't taken off. So you make those kind of observations. Think about your goals. And one of my goals is always to, how do I reduce lawn when I'm working on a property? And one of my greatest sort of cheat tricks is taking drone photographs and you know they don't have to be fancy. If you don't have a drone, I promise you you can probably find a kid that you can hire. And you know it gives you this great bird's eye perspective of your property or an area. And this is a lot of times, you know, designer start by bird's eye, even though you don't experience a landscape. You buy a bird's eye, but you see connections. You see areas that, oh, maybe I could shrink this, you know, this lawn by extending this shrub border. Or, you know, I can make a path here. So therefore, I don't need any of this lawn, I could erase it all if I just switched to a path. And a drone is a great way to see those connections and opportunities. That's kind of fun. That's kind of great. And to be able to see, again, that bird's eye view, yeah, that's kind of a fun idea. It is. And then another little another little hack I have is, you know, I think we all take tons of pictures in our gardens and sometimes you take them when everything's in bloom and you get distracted by how colorful and fabulous everything looks. But if you switch some of those colored photographs into black and white, it lets you see structure a lot more. Yes may say like, oh actually that really fabulous pink blooming, whatever. It's just like lying in the middle of the path. If I could cut it back or clear it, you see the structure when you switch to black and white. So those are two tricks I use and I actually do a lot of that this time of year because luckily things are a little quieter. I'm still watering like mad but I can start to pull back and think about edits that I want to make and fall. And if I do want to plant some things, it's also a great time to bring in shrubs and even plugs. I'm doing that down to the work of now. Was your home garden once more formal, sort of more of a, you know, trademark traditional ornamental, oh, it was. Focus garden, then it is, okay. So you've gone through this shift yourself on your home property as well. Well, I'm going through it still, okay. And I talk about it. Actually, when I give talks on my garden,

I show the influence. I was lucky 25 years ago, and I would travel to Europe, and I'd see these very formal English gardens. And I loved it. I still love them. But I'd come back, and I think, OK, I want the hedges. I want the boxwood. I still have many of those remnants, but it's such a small percentage now to my overall planting than it was.

But you know, I think you can evolve. And I think a garden, you don't have to't have to do it all at once. I mean, I can't rip everything out that I have. But I can, you know, start to shift so that my plant pallet is, you know, if the sweet spot is 70% native beneficial plants, I can do that by really considering everything I'm bringing in now. And it's not boxwood anymore. So years ago, friends of mine, her guard designer since the outlaw, they came in. And one of the things they said to me was, first making my garden, they said, well, because we're walking around outside. And they were like, well, we can't start here. We need to go inside and look out the window. And from key windows in the house, So one of their things and this is, you know,

each designer has their own tips, so to speak, you know, Al Montras and they said, where do you sit,

where do you spend your time, where do you see this garden from, Margaret, when you're not crawling

around on your hands and knees, you know, in it and they were like, go inside, look out the window

and let's frame some nice views for you to appreciate your handiwork when you go inside. And so that was one of their tips. So what you have in this in the video that you did for the series that we talked about, the Less Lawn More Life Challenge, you gave a number of tips like that about sort of conscious things that would, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very I agree you need to look at your views from inside. But then as you go out, you want to lead people through these landscapes and, you know, these nature-based landscapes can be wilder and they're you know you can benefit from putting in paths and I think that's a very easy first thing to do is you know even if you moa path through like high plantings it's it leads you through it takes your eye through the landscape and it also just makes it look you it's like intentional, more care for. But that's a really easy thing to do. And then I also, I think it's important to have sort of focal points in these wilder landscapes and they can be anything from like a chair that's tucked under, you know, a tree in a bed of ferns, I actually have that in my house, or a pot that takes your eye and focuses it, or a pair of pots or a pair of finials that then frame a view to be on. So I just use those are really simple tricks to I think work in these as um, landscapes. And, and they work and they're, and they're pretty easy to do too. So to, to, to really, to really sort of direct the eye and the visitor, uh, to beckon to say come, come over here, look this way and, and frame a picture, a desired picture, um, beyond that, whether it's a paraphernal, as you say, or gate gate posts or whatever the heck it is that that announce this thing beyond this thing beyond, yeah, or just the path in some cases. Yeah. That way. And the other thing is I think it's so important is places to sit in these landscapes, because you know, there's a heartbeat beyond the plants. And so if you give, you know, in a woodland, a small bench or small bench or in an orchard, a couple of chairs, you start to engage with the birds and observation of this habitat you're creating. And that's really special. And it's actually really rewarding and kind of easy. So I always work on getting seats throughout the garden, not just in one place, but you know, and it can just be a little perch. But I think that's really, really important because you do get to enjoy the reason that you're planting this way. Right. That intimacy to sit there and be still and watch and listen for who else is with you. You know, who's doing what in the garden? Yeah. I think when we spoke for the time story you talked about maybe even like making a wider space within some paths like a circle or something. Yeah, that's yeah, and I've done it. You know, I had the experience just doing our orchard this summer. You know, we had a wedding and we had to have a lot of people in our orchard and we've always had just about this five foot path that meandered through. But we then took this path and then mode a couple of really big circles where people could gather and it has changed the whole experience. I'm so excited. I mean, this is what I love about gardening. You're learning, you know, 23 years we've been on this property, but I'm still discovering new ways to approach it. And that's a really easy thing to do. You just take a path and in certain areas, just in, you know, I create a circle. It's perfect for putting like four Adorandec shares. Or a fire. So that's another really simple way. You don't even have to bring in the masonry. You can change your locations, your deer. It's a very fun and easy way to experience the landscape. In the video, you mentioned about, you know, when you're speaking about mowing a path or using masonry or whatever gravel or whatever, you talk about Chris Beges and how they also help to define a place, yes. Indeed. And I think that's something I hear as a, when I'm talking to clients or people, it's like, oh, good. But does it just look like a big mess? You know, everything gets so tall and it fluffed. And I think if you do do, the Chris Beges, like I I have stone paths to go right leading through it. It's that good yang and yang or gravel tariff. You know, the plants might be kind of messy, but the it's held in place or it balances. It's counterbalanced by a very strict rectangular gravel tariff. So I think Chris Beges is our important. And sometimes you even need to mo, like I have meadows that might go to the property and just mowing a surround of like four feet that surrounds that edge can make it look neat or two. And not like it's just like an unkept portion of a property. Do you think that Chris Bed can help a lot? Now, I suspect, I don't know, because I haven't seen hundreds of pictures yet, of all your landscapes in every single instance, but I suspect that your beds, so to speak, of plants that I'm not going to see mulch mulch mulch mulch mulch mulch mulch

as in bagged stuff right? No not at all and I you know I laugh because you know I think we're all so aware of the plastic in the world and in our bodies but I also think we have to think about the plastic that we're bringing into our landscapes i.e. in the mulch and the fertilizers and the food. And think about, if we close the loop, I bet we could reduce that considerably if not completely. So I do not bring in mulch anymore. I do mulch my leaves. I leave my leaves in perennial beds, the winter. But I also plant so heavily now, we call it green mulch that, you know that when things start to grow, you don't really see ground. And one, it's aesthetically such so much more pleasing. I'm totally off that look of lots of mulch and a bed. I think we can do it better. And you don't have to weed as much. It holds holds the water and also if your matrix of these thick plantings includes things like carrots and everything it has such long seasonal beauty because there's this beautiful gold throughout my beds in the winter as they dry. So I really I think there's so many better ways to have mulch. I agree mulch plants and everything in a bed than just bagged mulch. I always loved years ago, Cloud iOS, the designer from Fido Designs. She said, plants are the mulch Margaret, she said, plants are the mulch, you know. And they are. And they are, and you know, like a Karex Alvacans next a Hella board they look so beautiful together. It's it's like art as well. So and they are and and once you start to do that I mean and again, this is something I wasn't doing when I first started gardening You really have fun with it and you start looking for Partnership plants that look great right in Praniel beds and and borders together. Right. Right. So we're looking for some focal areas that we want to direct. You know, the eye to we're going to frame some views. We're going to make paths. We're going to invite our eye and our visitors ourselves in. we're going to make seating areas, we're going to keep some of the edges crisper. And what other kinds of things are, you know, if you're walking with a client through a garden at this time of year, like what are some of the other things that you're looking for in terms of eventual tweaks or advice or whatever, or that you're thinking about your own garden? Well, you know, one thing is talking about blurring the edges. And I think it's really exciting that, and Doug Tell me very much about this, is our connected landscapes. But I think there's this great opportunity in the suburban areas that we live in, the roadside, which are usually mowed lawn. But if we all started to plant these out with more combinations of native small shrubs, because I know towns need to sometimes cut in those areas, but native perennials, we could start to connect landscapes in communities so easily and make it so pretty. That's one thing I'm thinking about is, is how do we continue edges? Tell me a little bit more about like how do you give me examples of what blurring the edges? Well, I think blurring the edges is making it so that when you drive by a landscape, you can't say like, oh, their property and begins here and ends there because the plant material, will bleed like hopefully their neighbors on board with this too, so they may have some sort of viburnum that goes through their woodland, the native viburnum, some winterberry, but it doesn't end at my property, but it blurs to the next one. And I think a really easy place to start this are those mode grassways that are around every, you know, along every roadside in the bourbon areas. And we're starting it in a few places in our town. And I love it. And I think it's kind of an easy and fun way to start planting in a more naturalistic manner. And we'll also kind of get to know your neighbors because people are working on these together.

Like, you know, I'm doing this, would you want to do it? And it's fine. Right, right. Okay, so that's another one then. And other kind of, you know, from because I assume that when you first studied landscape design, the advice was probably a list of, you know, was probably a list of tools to speak, design tricks or tools or practices. I don't know if they all still apply, but they've evolved. Well, they have evolved, but I think design is based also on some practical and also geometry. I see when I look at the front of a house, I do not put planting all against the house. You need to, the rule, and I still think it works, is take your front of your house and flip it down. And that's like your planting should really work around that area. So don't plant all right up against your house. And take the front of your house and flip it down. I'm sorry, take your front of your house and flip it down. Meaning flip it down. And so if your house is 20 feet, you go down and that's 20 feet. That's all to where you plant. That 20 feet provides you an entrance and a plinth on which to settle your house. And I think in this more naturalistic landscaping. That's a really good thing I mean naturalistic can kind of be larger gestures So give yourself space to do it. Don't don't just you know as I say plant right at the edge of your house Right because what we saw in the post-war, or first the post-war,

one of the two super initial sort of templated suburban

communities was stuff practically glued to the front

of the house, as they called it,

foundation planting well-named.

Right, right.

And actually, once you step away from that,

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