Books for Garden Inspiration: The Living Landscape

The long winter months when my garden is dormant provide a time for me to seek inspiration from garden books. One important source of inspiration this winter has been Rick Darke and Doug Tallamy’s The Living Landscape (Timber Press, 2014).  Darke, a horticulturalist, and Tallamy, an ecologist, have combined their talents and perspectives to consider how we can create home gardens that are both beautiful and ecologically functional.

The book is organized into five chapters, but it may make most sense to think of it as having two major parts: Chapters 1-4 lay the conceptual groundwork for Darke and Tallamy’s approach, while chapter 5 (which makes up almost half the book and is longer than first four chapters combined) applies these concepts to the home garden.

Chapter 1 is devoted to the key theoretical framework of the book, the idea that landscapes (both wild and domestic) can be understood as a set of interconnected layers, including vertical layers (canopy, understory, shrub, herbaceous, ground), horizontal layers (e.g., edges), and cultural layers. A richly layered landscape, they argue, is both aesthetically pleasing and ecologically functional. Chapters 2 and 3 focus on ecological concepts, the interrelated community of living organisms and the ecological functioning of layered landscapes. Chapter 4, “The Art of Observation,” focuses on how we can better see and read both wild and domestic landscapes. Chapter 5, “Applying Layers to the Home Garden,” brings all these ideas together in an analysis of how to create richly layered, beautiful, and ecologically functional gardens.

The Living Landscape is not a how-to book with a set of foolproof steps for creating functional layers in the home garden. It is primarily a conceptual volume, providing us with tools to see and think about our gardens in new ways. It felt to me like the more advanced sequel course to Doug Tallamy’s Bringing Nature Home (see review here), a book that completely changed how I understood the presence of insects in my garden. In saying that this is a conceptual book, I don’t mean to imply that The Living Landscape does not provide practical advice; it does. This a big, gorgeous picture book, and every idea is richly illustrated with lush photographic examples (mostly by Rick Darke). There are also important pieces of garden design advice. I found this guideline for creating biodiversity in the home garden particularly helpful:

   One potential down side of plant diversity in gardens is that it is often concentrated at too small a scale. For the love of plants, gardeners sometimes group too many species with distinctly different growing needs into areas that are too small or not diverse enough to sustain them…. Looking to healthy natural habitats as models is a reminder that while the overall plant diversity of a landscape may be high, in any given space or localized ecosystem there is considerable repetition of a few key species.

   When designing for diversity, it’s important to aim for the highest supportable biodiversity overall but to avoid unsustainable variety in any one spot. (p. 151)

Practical information is also provided in a series of appendices (organized by region of the United States) that list the landscape and ecological functions of plants that could be used for the home garden.

Darke and Tallamy live and garden in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States, and their analysis and examples are based primarily on the deciduous forests that characterize the native wild landscapes of that region. This means that their analysis is most relevant for those who garden in conditions similar to that of the mid-Atlantic states. My own home in New England is a geographical neighbor to the mid-Atlantic region, has a similar deciduous forest native habitat, and includes many of the same plants, so the book translated well for me. As you get further afield from the mid-Atlantic  region, however, either geographically or ecologically, the specifics of The Living Landscape become less useful. Although Darke and Tallamy do include some examples in the text from other regions of the country and even the world, the book privileges the mid-Atlantic states. The plant listing for the mid-Atlantic region takes up 32 pages, compared with much shorter listings for the Midwest and mountain states (14 pages), the southeast region (10 pages), New England (8 pages), the Pacific Northwest (7 pages), and the southwest region (5 pages). And, of course, Darke and Tallamy have not attempted to analyze the landscape and ecological functions of native plants for other parts of the world.

Despite these inevitable limitations, I think Darke and Tallamy’s conceptual framework would help gardeners anywhere to look at and think about both their native landscapes and their gardens differently. For those in the United States mid-Atlantic and neighboring regions, the book is a goldmine of information and is likely to become an indispensible reference.