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"My garden, with its silence and pulses of fragrance that come and go on the airy undulations, affects me like sweet music. Care stops at the gates, and gazes at me wistfully through the bars." Alexander Smith

"Green" garden

Planting Design

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"I am fully and intensely aware that plants are conscious of love and respond to it as they do to nothing else."
Celia Thaxter

* In the interest of supporting
local plant communities and
discouraging exotic invasives,
for each planting design,
Liriodendron pledges to specify
a minimum of 70% native species. *

Schematic for meditation garden

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                              *** Did you know . . . ? ***

A native plant is defined as "a species that occurs naturally in a particular region, state, ecosystem, and habitat without direct or indirect human actions." (as defined by The Federal Native Plant Conservation Committee, 1994). To effectively fulfill their respective ecological functions within a designed landscape, it's essential to select local genotypes that have evolved within conditions specific to the region or site where they naturally grow.

A plant community is a group of native plants that have evolved together over millions of years to fulfill their respective ecological niches within a given ecosystem at a specific time and place. By contrast, a plant combination simply refers to a group of plants that compose aesthetically and culturally pleasing juxtapositions. Such combinations are inconstant, varying with personal taste and ever-changing social conditions.

*** Native plants combine the best of both utility and aesthetics;
        Even as they fulfill essential ecological services that support all life on earth,
        a well-sited plant community can be stunningly beautiful
       in the designed landscape!

Ecological succession refers to the transformation of plant communities over time,
as plants grow or are disturbed, and as other environmental site conditions develop
and change. The word ecology, a noun coined in 1873 by German zoologist Ernst Haeckel, derives from the Greek words oikos ("dwelling house, habitation") + logia ("study of"). For engaging reveries on the concept of dwelling, read The Poetics of Space, by Gaston Bachelard.
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