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January’s great gift to gardeners is time.
For this month of the year, there is little to call us outdoors to work in the garden. Which leaves us time to read, to study, to plan and to dream of how we will re-mold our gardens in the spring.
Looking back into the Forest Garden archives, I would love to share this post with you again in hopes that you might be inspired to seek out Ken Druse’s wonderful books about gardening. And even if you don’t get to his The Natural Habitat Garden right away, perhaps a few of his ideas, shared here, will inspire you to move towards a more naturalistic style of gardening in the year ahead.
Wishing you wildness and warmth,
-WG
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“…enlarge Earth’s diminished domain by growing native plant gardens modeled on nature’s original communities.”
Ken Druse, from The Natural Habitat Garden 1994
Are you as conflicted as I, when choosing new plants for your garden? Do you, also, spend winter hours dreaming over nursery catalogs? Maybe we share a proclivity to grow enamored of certain beautiful and interesting plants, while not considering the ‘bigger picture.’
What bigger picture is that, you wonder?
Why, our planet and its diminishing species, of course. While I’ve never been an ardent native plant enthusiast, living and working in this forest garden continues nudging me in that direction.
I’m reading Ken Druse and Margaret Roach’s beautiful book, now more than a dozen years old, called The Natural Habitat Garden. Building on his earlierThe Natural Garden and The Natural Shade Garden, Druse invites us to not only create a beautiful garden for…
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