How Truly Beautiful Gardens Are Made: Structure, Plants, and Living Legacy
By Steve Mydelski | Natchez Glen House
Setting the Stage: A Journey Through Gardening’s Many Worlds
For the last 20 years, I’ve gotten a really interesting perspective on the world of horticulture, gardening, and landscape design. I have now officially worked in every single segment of the gardening world. I have worked at a professional high-end nursery that was over 250 acres. I have worked and collaborated with hundreds of independent garden centers. I’ve had conversations with buyers and suppliers for big-box retail stores. I’ve created a massive perennial garden that I own. I have made large, beautifully dynamic gardens for clients. I’ve made small, petite, whimsical gardens for clients. I’ve worked on gardens solely for ecological purposes.
I wanted to set that framework for you because it’s important to never have a two-dimensional view of any business, industry, process, or for that matter, a garden.
The Traditional Way Gardens Are Built
For years, the way gardens have been made during my time doing this is there is a new home that wants to be built. Somewhere along the process, there is a landscape architect. That landscape architect, depending upon the home and the budget, is the one who draws the lines. This is where the path goes. This is where we want to make shade. This is where we need to handle that water that’s going to run off of that driveway.
In some ways, they’re framing the stage. They’re the ones who are guiding our eyes from this line to that line to bring the property to life. To give it bones and structure—literally the definition of architecture.
But I’ve always seen this gap that exists. Because quite frankly, no matter if you’re the richest person in town or if you’re like myself and are always hustling and struggling to keep your business going and keep your family fed, regardless of your background, there’s a gap. A creative gap.
The Missing Layer: Intimacy With Plants
I’ve always believed that good garden designers are also good plant people. In my experience doing that and in the amazing professional gardeners that I’ve met, there’s always been one thing that’s pretty universally true. They all have nursery experience. They either create their own nursery, work at a nursery, but they get to know plants intimately—from seed to flower, from root to shoot.
That knowing of a plant, that level of intimacy, gives a certain creative whimsy that many landscape architects don’t have the opportunity to develop. Many times their jobs are dealing with concrete contractors and dealing with stormwater management. Especially as all of us try to move towards a more ecological construction future, many landscape architects have their brains in those directions.
Those good garden designers I mentioned, I see us as the people that provide the color inside the lines. Like a coloring book, they draw the hard lines, and I paint inside them. I paint with plants.
And to really know a plant’s color—not just in spring, but throughout the year—is essential. Because that’s the beauty of plants. They don’t stay stagnant. They don’t ever stay the same. From the day the season begins for that plant, the day it germinates, to how it blooms in the spring, changes in the summer, recesses in the fall, rebirths in the spring, has a beautiful seed head through winter—the plant is in constant change.
To really know a plant, you have to see it every day.
Living With the Garden, Season After Season
It’s been one of the great privileges of me creating and developing Natchez Glen, is I’ve gotten the opportunity to see plants every day. I’ve had visitors recently who came to the garden in early March. And the difference between the garden in early March, and as I write this on the very last days of April, is monumental. It’s hard to imagine that four to six weeks could be that different. But it is.
The Japanese maples were in slumber in mid-March. They’re vibrant and awake today. The peonies were just showing their beautiful burgundy eyes. And today, they’re covered in flowers.
Not knowing plants limits a person’s experience in coming here. They don’t see the differences between March to April to May. And one more time, this garden will drastically change from the look it has here in late April to the look that it’ll have in late June. And then yes, yet again, the look from June to September will be beautifully different.
The Ideal World: How Gardens Should Be Made
So in an ideal world, how would this all work? How would you get the cottage garden of your dreams, or the peony paradise that you’ve always wanted? And still deal with these practical issues of stormwater management, runoff, and erosion control, and where’s the best place to put a path around your home so you can enjoy those flowers?
Well, that’s the beauty of the landscape architect. That’s what they do. They get to draw, and shape, and build the very structure of paths that we walk on. And then I come in as a garden designer and color in between those lines, based upon if a client’s inspired by something, or wondrous about something, or a client has a lifelong romance with peonies or roses.
But in today’s current system, that’s not the norm. My own personal career is usually greatly impacted by this. I’m rarely involved in the new construction of a home. I come in after the process. And many times, the client’s vision of what they thought would be drawn between those lines hasn’t been.
Oftentimes, landscape contractors are the next level of this process. And those are people that are charged with one of the most beautiful things in our world—keeping the lines together that the architect drew. Keeping the grass so it seems uniform and visually aesthetically pleasing to our eye. Keeping hedges tight. Keeping those lines on track that our architect drew.
But they, again, still don’t live with plants. They spend more time with the tools of their trade. So again, the process is lacking something.
For the Pragmatic Mind: How This Looks in Practice
For those who appreciate the practical side of building, here’s what this ideal looks like in real-world steps:
• Start with a landscape architect early in the homebuilding process. Let them shape the land, solve drainage and grading issues, create the hard paths and spaces you will live with every day.
• Bring in a plant-focused garden designer alongside them. Someone who knows plants not just by catalog photos, but by their habits, needs, and year-round beauty.
• Allow for a second phase of planting after construction: Once the heavy work is done, give the soil time to settle, and then build the living part of the garden with careful thought.
• Invest for the long term: Choose plants for longevity, for evolving beauty across decades, not just instant gratification.
• Expect your garden to change: Build with the understanding that what you plant today will grow, shift, surprise you—and that’s part of the joy.
Conclusion: Gardens Are Living Art
A garden is not just a project. It’s not just a drawing on paper or a list of plant names. It’s something far more wondrous. A garden is a living painting—one that never dries, never stays still, but changes every day with light, with rain, with the turning of the seasons. A garden is a stage play where the actors—the Japanese maples, the peonies, the perennials—make their entrances and exits, have their moments of crescendo, and slip away quietly to make room for others.
This living, breathing quality is what makes gardens different from any other form of art humans create. They are collaborations with time itself. To know a garden is to accept that change is not failure; it’s the beauty.
The most historically relevant duo that I love and appreciate for this relationship is Sir Edwin Lutyens and Gertrude Jekyll. Gertrude Jekyll was an amazing plant woman. Well before you and I were born, she was talking about native plants. She had a vivid eye for visual design in gardens. Her use of flowers, her use of whimsy, is still something I—and so many others—are trying to emulate in our gardens today.
Edward Lutyens was an amazing architect with an eye for lines and visual symmetry and formality and structure and materials and how to manage the paths that the gardens would be walked.
What I just explained to you could still exist today. I’ve often said to clients I would love nothing more than more opportunities to work with landscape architects at the beginning of a project when they’re involved, where their imagination and creativity start, and we can collaborate on something just like in the past.
The reason I reference those gardens and Edward Lutyens and Gertrude Jekyll is those gardens that the two of them collaborated on are so good and were so dynamic that many of them still exist today, over a hundred years after their creation.
Those are the type of gardens that, no matter what our budget, we should all be hoping we can get a little bit of that magic. A garden that isn’t just transactional. A garden where we don’t put things in and have the next person worry about it. But a garden that can be a legacy for you.
Someone else, a hundred years from now, will live in your house and they’ll maybe not know your name, but they’ll know that someone cared. That someone colored inside those beautiful lines and planted a peony.
If you’re a home gardener or if you’re someone who’s dreaming and getting the opportunity to build the house of your dreams, we should all just have a little bit—a sprinkle—of the kind of creativity that the strong lines and the beautiful coloring inside of them that a garden designer and an architect can create together.