If you have ever tried creating, and then caring for, a habitat-style garden with native plants … well, let’s just say it’s not exactly the same thing as combining a group of hostas with some astilbes an a couple of bleeding hearts. 

In the process of writing a recent NY Times garden column about Wild Ones, the nationwide nonprofit membership organization that promotes native plants, I was introduced to today’s guest, the artist and landscape architect Preston Montague of Durham, N.C., who patiently schooled me in some of whys and how-to’s of naturalistic garden design and care that I wanted to invite him to also share with you – including some very crafty uses for a string trimmer. 

Preston is a landscape architect and artist who teaches landscape architecture to undergraduates at North Carolina A&T University in Greensboro. He contributed one of the 20-something regionally focused native plant landscape designs available to download on the Wild Ones website, plus a series of videos on naturalistic design for Izel Plants nursery available on YouTube – just two examples of his various efforts, as he describes it, “to help translate very complicated ideas of landscape ecology into an approach that gardeners of all skill levels can deploy.” 

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