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Let’s Build Wildlife Habitat into Everyday Places Everywhere

Where others see trash in an industrial wasteland, John Little sees the raw materials to create startlingly effective ecological habitat.

For 25 years now, this English innovator has worked to recycle, reclaim and repurpose the stuff we throw away into artful ecological structures.

He takes a mix of crushed highway rubble, rusted out old cars, smashed bathroom tiles together with handfuls of wildflower seeds, and rejigs all the broken pieces to fit just about any niche in the urban jungle. Everything from green roofs and habitat walls to bus shelters and buzzy meadow landscapes.

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Wildscape Update: New Talks

When I first posted my idea for Wildscaping here in spring 2019, it was with the secret hope that both the word and its spirit might take on a life of its own.

Like a message in a digital bottle.

We all know what happened next. Driven by the pandemic lockdowns, we experienced a seismic cultural shift to suddenly embrace all things plants, gardens, and matters of biodiversity in ways no-one could have ever predicted or imagined.

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Nöel Kingsbury: Wild about the future

There’s no time like the present to talk about the future.

That’s the premise for the next edition of The New Perennialist Talks with very special guest writer Nöel Kingsbury. Our goal is to consider the future of naturalistic garden design and where it might go next.

This feels like a singular opportunity to put out our collective antennae and Nöel is superbly qualified to lead off this discussion.

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Happy Earth Mother’s Day

It feels like the right day to celebrate mothers, earthly and otherwise. After all, our roots are umbilically connected.

My mother used to love to tell this story about my early brush with the world of flowers.

One summer, when I was no more than six years old,  she gave me an envelope full of marigold seeds and a few instructions on how to plant them. This being the first time in my life attempting any such thing, the task became a kind of slow-motion adventure. I dropped a few tiny seeds into a soil-filled terra cotta pot, watered it and set out the pot on the sunny stone wall outside the front door of our Toronto suburban home.

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Enter Sandman: The High Diversity Plantings of Peter Korn

Our talk in April was a trip to the beach. Because the near mythical Swedish plantsman and designer Peter Korn is pioneering a new way of creating wildly inspired climate-tough gardens and he’s doing it all with sand.

The gardens of Peter Korn are like no other – bursting with a hyper-concentration of esoteric plant species with non-stop flowering from spring till fall. Every plant is neatly fitted to its ecological niche and microhabitat within the greater scheme. From his base at Klinta Trädgård near Malmö, Peter is setting convention on its head with gardens that defy usual practices. They’re tough, beautiful, and pure catmint for plant lovers.

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