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Cool Springs Press

Your Natural Garden: A Practical Guide to Caring for an Ecologically Vibrant Home Garden

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As featured in The New York Times, a valuable and artfully crafted guide to tending a naturalistic garden.

From plantsman Kelly Norris, author of 
New Naturalism, comes a much-needed handbook to maintaining today’s natural gardens. Naturalistic plantings, overflowing with biodiverse communities of plants, are filling front and backyards around the globe with colorful blooms, easy-care plants, and wildlife habitat. But caring for a naturalistic garden is vastly different than caring for a traditional home landscape of carefully manicured plants separated by mulch and regularly primped and pruned. In Your Natural Garden, tending your garden properly means understanding its connection to the greater natural world and using garden care methods that mimic nature instead of controlling it.

Page by page, you’re guided through all the seasons of a naturalistic garden’s life and the tasks and to-dos that come with each of them. Including how to:

  • Encourage and establish complexity in a new garden
  • Promote growth and variation by letting your plants self propagate
  • Determine when and what to edit, and when it’s best to let chaos rein
  • Decide if and when weeding is necessary
  • Foster the insects and other animals that rely on your plants
  • Understand succession in the naturalistic garden and why it’s important 
  • Know when it’s time to cut back your garden and how to do it right


Verdant photographs accompany the text throughout, offering examples of well-tended naturalistic plantings and the tasks that are needed to properly care for them.

Book Details

ISBN: 

9780760388228

EAN: 

0760388229

Binding: 

Hardcover

Pages: 

208

Authors: 

Kelly D Norris

Publisher: 

Cool Springs Press

Published Date: 2025-14-01

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Customer Reviews

Based on 4 reviews
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S
Stacey
Pretty gardens

Lovely photos accented with long-winded flowery writing, this is a gardening book for English majors. If you know anything about ecology you may find the writing style rather tedious. I’m annoyed because because the author has some valuable things to say, I think?

A
Amazon Customer
Great resource book.

Kelly's book and his other book can help both the amateur or the professional landscape designer. His processes should be studied. It is a nice resource book to use on repeated occasions.

T
Tim C.
Great insight from a great native plant designer

Tons of great information. Kelly is one of my favorite native plant designers.

b
bookreader
Beautiful natural ideas

Those who love sophisticated garden design books will enjoy Your Natural Garden. The book explores wild and natural garden sites from many locales, and offers exquisite ideas for planting choices and arrangements. But the emphasis is on natural environments: hillsides, ravines, wide expanses of land- that I do not have available to experiment with or implement such designs. But for meditating on gardens beckoning the viewer and reader to enjoy the beauty of the natural, this volume is wonderful.