Praise for Your Natural Garden, by Kelly D. Norris, available December 3, 2024
“Full of heart, Kelly’s creative and progressive approach is one for these times, where we can be led by our gardens to a nuanced, responsive place of wonder and abundance. To naturalistic gardens that personally reflect our greater context, where plants are the protagonists. The glorious pages of The Natural Garden share considered means to gently get there. Love it!” — Jac Semmler, plant practitioner and author of Super Bloom
“Your Natural Garden serves as a compass in the complex landscape of ecological gardening. With a blend of scientific rigor and prose, the book demystifies the art of natural gardening and guides readers towards a deeper understanding of their role as stewards of the earth.” — Dr. Jared Barnes, associate professor and author of the plant•ed newsletter
“Kelly Norris has more to tell us at this crucial time than you can imagine until you start reading this brilliant, beautiful, welcoming book. Here he deftly and joyfully interweaves the science, art, philosophy, and practicalities of making and tending natural gardens. What makes this book and Kelly’s many other contributions so powerful are not just his extraordinary knowledge, mastery of language and communication, ferocious observation skills, and depth and breadth of experience, it’s his passionate spirit and mantra of openness, generosity, and optimism that set him apart from other leaders in the world of horticulture and gardening.” — Lauren Springer, designer, author, plantswoman
“Norris translates his own botanically fluent planting style into a new approach to gardening. The book is an essential guide for gardeners seeking wilder, more natural connections to the world around them.” — Adam Woodruff, Garden and landscape design consultant
“Your Natural Garden is such a lovely field guide to creating an ecological landscape in a residential setting. I have always admired Kelly’s perspective on plants and ecology, but this book has energized my design brain tenfold. I love that he places us (humans) as an integral part of our tiny ecosystems…and how we influence these systems via our habits and learned experiences.
Kelly stresses that even the smallest garden is part of a natural patchwork of landscapes around the world…and we, as the gardener, are integral to that. This book not only explores the importance of plants, wildlife, and soil, but goes a step further by providing us with practical methods on how we can nurture a healthy natural garden via these elements.
There is a lot of goodness, but my favorite part was the importance of considering both ecology and aesthetics in unison. The “art of natural gardening” is a striking balance between achieving beauty, while still maintaining the functional garden ecosystem. Concepts such as pattern, color, desire lines, structure, and even pruning are fabulous ways to extend aesthetics into ecology. I can't wait to share Your Natural Garden with my students!” — Lisa Nunamaker, Garden Design Educator at Paper Garden Workshop
“Do we grow our gardens? Or do our gardens grow us? Through Kelly Norris’s wise and thought-provoking essays, we learn that the answers to those questions are as beautifully intertwined as the roots beneath our feet. Reframing the role of humans as keystone species, Norris dispenses with the notion that nature is inherently better off without us. As agents of inevitable disturbance, we have a choice: we can mow and spray and walk away, divorced from the process, or we can plant and nurture and gently prune like the grazing mammals that we are, inviting our floral and faunal neighbors to teach us along the way.
Your Natural Garden is packed with mesmerizing photography and practical, artful advice gleaned from extensive knowledge and experience, but this is not a how-to guide of formulaic recipes and ideas. It’s a guide for how to think and act differently—through patience, observation, flexibility, and the kind of humility that can only be seeded when we share the reins with nature.” — Nancy Lawson, humanegardener.com, author of The Humane Gardener and Wildscape
“Finally! A book for ecological gardeners that considers more than just planting design. Kelly Norris is both philosophical and instructional with this series of short essays on everything from site prep, to carbon sequestration, to pruning, all of it poetically written and romantically illustrated. A wealth of knowledge and design chops that every gardener can learn from.” — Rebecca McMackin, garden designer, Ecological Horticulture
“Kelly Norris’ Your Natural Garden perfectly complements his earlier New Naturalism. This guide provides in-depth approaches for us to think about our gardens as part of a greater ecosystem. Kelly provides guidance on design, ecological gardening approaches—including a great section on attracting insects and birds called “creature features”—and everything else we need to know to create and be stewards of a natural, wild, and biodiverse garden. This book will guide you on an engaged, rewarding, and environmentally conscious gardening journey." - Andrew Bunting, Vice President of Horticulture, Pennsylvania Horticultural Society
