Adam Woodruff LLC

https://www.bhg.com/landscaping-redesign-mistakes-11850778

Redesigning Your Yard? Avoid These 5 Common Landscaping Mistakes, Say the Pros These smart tips from professional garden designers will help prevent you from making a costly backyard blunder.

Naturalistic planting doesn't require a naturalistic setting.

This approach isn't limited to meadows or large rural properties. Here, the same techniques—layered planting, seasonal movement, intermingled species—sit against a stone balustrade, manicured turf, and crisp bed lines.

The hardscape and lawn aren't competing with the planting. They're framing it. Structure gives wild beauty a place to land.

If you have architecture, edges, and turf, you have a frame. The planting can still move.

Sometimes plants are the solution.

Jones Road is 20,000 square feet of planting—no designed terraces, no elaborate infrastructure. Just grasses establishing rhythm. Perennials creating density. Shrubs anchoring the view. The planting shapes the space.

The site asked for it: a ridgeline overlooking pastures and woodlands. Clients who wanted immersion. Anything more would have competed with what was already there.

Jones Road has appeared in several books and magazines as an example of matrix-based planting and naturalistic design—including Landscape Planting Design, Planting in a Post-Wild World, Gardens Illustrated, and Fine Gardening, among others.

A few of you asked about matrix planting after the last post. Worth going deeper.

In the wild, plants form communities. They layer vertically—ground covers below, seasonal perennials through the middle, structure above. They share space, compete for it, support each other. No mulch. No gaps.

Thomas Rainer and Claudia West lay it out in Planting in a Post-Wild World—a framework for designing plant communities rather than plant collections. You work in layers: ground cover that suppresses weeds and holds moisture, seasonal plants that carry color and movement, structural plants that anchor the composition year-round.

The result is a planting that functions. It fills in, knits together, evolves. Less maintenance, more resilience, and a cohesion you can't get by placing plants one at a time.

Redstone Lane is built this way. If you want to understand the approach more deeply, the book is essential.

Planting design responds to place.

The front garden at Redstone Lane—evokes a woodland edge. Filtered light, layered shade plantings, grasses spilling across the path. Quiet and contemplative where the rear garden is open and animated.

Same property. Different conditions. Different atmosphere.

Swipe to see the journey.

Architecture by Walter Jacobs. Landscape architecture by Matthew Cunningham. After image by .