Habitat gardening

About to leave for the Cullowhee Native Plants conference tomorrow, I'm reminded of how habitat gardening (as a concept) preceded some of the current thinking about creating functional landscapes that are ecologically balanced, including mostly native plants, as well as similarly adapted non-natives.

I've totally updated my Designing with Plants presentation to be a Designing with Native Plants version -- interesting to see that I had a lot more examples of design from my garden-visiting images, but plants are plants. My own style, as is my gardening companion's, is totally reflective of natural plant communities in both feel and function, but I'm constantly aware as I think about this, that we're bringing our understanding of plants and plant communities to the woodland garden, pocket meadow, and house-side plantings.

Plants as a creative medium pose a changing and dynamic palette as we create our gardens as gardeners -- nothing remains the same over time, so our hands as gardeners shape the design elements, too, whether we're naturalistic gardeners, or neat and tidy ones.

Pollinator habitat and Wild Ones signs

I loved this garden tended by a long-time Wild Ones member (in Minneapolis), visited prior to the Fling, along with another similar garden.

This roadside planting appeared in a previous post, too.

native curbside planting in Minneapolos