Introducing The Simple Landscape

Tips from a landscape designer for creating outdoor spaces that bring you peace and joy

Photo: Alice Virden-Speer

Since obtaining my landscape design degree in 2013, people in my small town have been coming up to me in the grocery store asking the same questions over and over. What should I plant? How do I get more color? How can I make things low maintenance?

Once a person even said to me, “I hate my landscape. Hate it. It stresses me out so much.”

When it’s clear that hiring a landscape designer is too costly, too time-consuming, or just “too much” for folks, I offer to text them names of my favorite landscape design books. To which they inevitably respond, “Couldn’t you just come over for a glass of wine sometime and tell me what to do?”

In this weekly newsletter, I will present landscaping fundamentals in bite-size pieces (aka tips), which I believe could help to solve many landscape issues for most people. I also plan to include book recommendations, gear reviews, favorite videos, and other gardening and landscaping tidbits.

My “design philosophy” is that outdoor spaces should be a source of peace, calm, beauty, and joy for people. And we should consider what is best from nature’s point of view as we create and maintain them.

I hold a horticulture degree in landscape architectural studies and practiced landscape design professionally for several years.

These days, I’m a member of the New York State Nursery and Landscape Association, and I serve as a volunteer gardener and designer for community-based projects.

Earlier in my career, I wrote about faith and spirituality. My book The Habit was published by Doubleday, and more recent work has appeared in Image journal online.

I live in rural Central New York with my husband and daughter and a miraculously hypoallergenic cat named Ivan.

PS Thank you very much to my early subscribers for being here while I figured out what I wanted to accomplish with my newsletter and its final name!