Landscape Design
22 pieces
May 10, 2026The Secret to a Beautiful, Bulletproof Landscape? Read Your Yard.Before you spend money on plants, read the site. A beautiful, productive landscape starts with understanding protection, water, sunlight, soil, and constraints before anything goes in the ground. Get those pieces right, and your yard has a real chance to become something lasting.
March 7, 2026The Myth of PruningBefore long the tree and the gardener are locked in a cycle. The harder the tree is pruned, the more aggressively it grows back. The more aggressively it grows back, the more pruning seems necessary. What began as maintenance turns into a yearly campaign to keep the tree in line. Many homeowners assume this is simply how fruit trees behave.
March 5, 2026Designing Edible Landscapes: The Overlooked Fruit Trees of the Maritime NorthwestDesigning edible landscapes in the maritime Northwest starts with climate. Many fruit trees will grow here, but far fewer produce consistently. This field guide gathers the trees that reliably fruit in our cool, wet coastal conditions.
February 28, 2026Legacy Landscapes: The Three Design Forces of Time, Experience, and StructureWhat happens in year ten? Year thirty? Temporal design treats time as the first material, shaping soil, structure, and succession before instability forces the issue.
February 27, 2026How to Landscape a Sand-Based Drainfield (Without Killing It)A drainfield isn’t decorative ground. It’s a living system that depends on air, intact soil structure, and restraint above it. In a 100% sand profile, planting must be shallow-rooted, successive, and defensively chosen for deer pressure. This guide outlines how to build a breathable meadow that protects infrastructure while carrying bloom from winter through fall.
October 13, 2025Sweet After the Freeze: Remembering Growing, and Eating the MedlarLong after apples are gone and pears are stored away, the medlar still hangs—brown, frost-touched, and waiting. It’s a fruit that sweetens only after the cold, a reminder that not everything worth tasting comes in season.
October 7, 2025The Biggest Mistake in Garden Design Isn’t What You ThinkFor millennia, fragrance guided the design of gardens — from Persian courtyards to monastic cloisters. Today it’s often missing. In the Pacific Northwest, restoring scent means designing with intimacy, ecology, and time.
September 27, 2025Growing Wine Grapes in Seattle? Part 2: Variety and RootstockGrowing grapes west of the Cascades isn’t about chasing the biggest names—it’s about matching what you plant to the heat, soil, and season you actually have. Varieties that ripen in 1400–2300 GDD and rootstocks that can handle pests, low pH, and wet soils are the difference between fruit worth crushing and years of disappointment. Like raising kids, success comes from giving them the right foundation and the right place to grow.
September 19, 2025Edible Landscape Design with Pacific Northwest Natives: Hawthorn — Top 10 Permaculture SpeciesThe Native Workhorse Hiding in Plain Sight Across the Pacific Northwest is, Arguably, the Ultimate Species for Edible Landscapes.
September 17, 2025Growing Olives in the Pacific Northwest: History, Survival, Struggle, and the Long Bet.Every olive carries history in its roots — Athens crowned with Athena’s gift, Noah reading the branch as landfall, empires rising and falling while the trees still bore fruit. To plant one here is to graft that long memory into Northwest soil, a wager that what endured for millennia might endure again.
September 11, 2025Can You Grow Wine Grapes in Cool Coastal Climates? Lessons from SeattleYou can grow wine grapes in Western Washington—if you pick the right varieties and stay ahead of powdery mildew. Forget the mystique; with soil, sun, water, and patience, a backyard vineyard is within reach.
September 9, 2025Growing Figs in the Pacific Northwest: A Practical Guide for GrowersFigs aren’t just for the Mediterranean. In the Pacific Northwest, a handful of hardy cultivars thrive with the right microclimate and pruning. Learn which varieties deliver, how to favor breba crops over late-ripening duds, and why now is the best time to experiment with figs in Cascadia.
September 4, 2025Edible Landscape Design: A Chestnut is True Generational Wealth — Top 10 Permaculture SpeciesChestnuts aren’t just nut trees — they’re living inheritance. From ancient groves in Italy still feeding families after 500 years to young orchards rising in the Northwest, these trees promise shade, food, and continuity long after we’re gone. Plant a pair today and you’re building more than a food forest — you’re building generational wealth.
September 3, 2025Edible Landscape Design: Aronia (Chokeberry) — Top 10 Permaculture SpeciesWhy Aronia (Chokeberry) Is the Shrub That Crushes Blueberries in Nutrition, Resilience, and Design
September 1, 2025Edible Landscape Design: Russian Comfrey — Top 10 Permaculture SpeciesRussian comfrey isn’t a crop you grow and forget — it’s a permanent fixture in the food forest. The sterile Bocking 14 hybrid won’t spread by seed, but once rooted it becomes a long-term nutrient engine, pulling minerals from deep in the soil and cycling them into leaves you can cut again and again. We plant it around fruit trees not only for its mulch and pollinator blooms, but also as a living barrier that keeps out runner grasses.
August 29, 2025Edible Landscape Design: Jerusalem Artichoke (Sunchoke) — Top 10 Permaculture SpeciesA dense patch of Jerusalem artichokes with tall green stalks and bright yellow sunflower-like blooms, growing along a hillside with trees in the background.
August 23, 2025Sod Off: How Big Lawn Is Killing Us (and What to Plant to Mitigate Climate Change)America’s biggest crop isn’t corn or wheat. It’s grass — and it’s complicit in cooking the planet. Here’s how we fix it without killing the lawn.
August 18, 2025Edible Landscape Design: Hazelnut (Filbert) — Top 10 Permaculture SpeciesHazelnut (filbert) is a top permaculture design species: storable calories, oil, mulch, fencing, habitat, and a living screen—all from one resilient shrub.
August 17, 2025Seriously. Stop Hard Pruning Your Fruit Trees in WinterPruning is not conquest. It’s a negotiation with biology. It should be a conversation across seasons. And the blade should be an instrument of guidance, never of amputation . Every winter the cycle repeats: trees pruned down to stubs, their silhouettes reduced to skeletons against the sky. Owners look on, wincing but resigned, convinced this is what stewardship demands. They’ve been told it’s gospel. They’ve been sold on myth. But in summer reality appears. Instead of fruit, the tree erupts...
February 21, 2020Small Space? Design Smart and Taste the Pacific Northwest’s Fruit AbundanceSince the first monastery gardens of Europe, growers have wrestled with the same quiet dilemma—how to fit Eden into a courtyard. The problem is not new. Every walled garden, every cloister orchard, was a study in constraint: soil, sun, and stone dictating what could live together and what must be left out. Space has always been the gardener’s first teacher.
July 19, 2019Permaculture's A-List Species: Helianthus maximiliani, A Perennial SunflowerIn permaculture, all things should have multi-functions. Topping my list this year is a lesser known sunflower that is perennial, edible, pollinator-friendly, drought tolerant, and just beautiful. It's Helianthus maximiliani, Maximilian Sunflower. I use this species on every project, as does our charity All Hands on Earth . Seeding is easy: sprinkle on the soil and press down lightly; water regularly until the shoots, which are edible, reach about 6-8" in height. Then let it go. I saw these...
June 26, 2019Yamaimo: The Strange Mountain Yam Missing from Your Garden and DietYamaimo is one of the stranger crops worth considering for edible landscape design: a quiet climbing vine above ground with a long edible tuber forming below. Grown on a trellis and harvested from deep containers, this Japanese mountain yam turns vertical space into real food production while offering a crop that can be eaten raw, grated, cooked, or stored.