An edible garden includes plants intended for food and can include both annual and perennial plants. In New York’s Capital District, the growing/food production season begins in mid-May, after the last frost. The season ends in late October/early November, usually at the first hard frost. This time period and seasonal daylight hours determine what edibles will successfully grow outdoors and when to save certain edible crop seeds.

Due to climate change, the Capital District has experienced an expanded growing season, year-on-year, and well as other climate-shifting ecological impacts.

Before identifying what a garden is, let’s define ‘wild’. Wild means a organism or habitat left to grow and develop on its own. The ecosystem is the decision-maker. Often what’s considered ‘wild’ is relates to how long an organism has been left to its own devices, without cultivation or domestication.

A garden is wildness with a curator—someone with an opinion. A garden has a purpose and a point of view. The curator edits, including some plants and excluding others, determining where a plant will be and the success of its spread or reproduction. A garden is not “natural,” but respects and allows room for natural processes in its development.

“Rewilding” is garden curation that prioritizes ecosystem restoration. Examples include replacing a traditional lawn or garden bed with native plants or allowing native plants to self-seed or creep into non-native garden areas.

Rewilding can minimize the presence of non-native species—but non-native species might also be considered part of a ‘new’ evolving ecology. Successful rewilding requires ecological understanding, landscape management, and (perhaps, maddeningly) patience.

A formal garden has a geometric layout and a central axis. A structural or compositional rule guides the formal garden’s plan and its development over time. Formal gardens frequently have visual or thematic repetition, symmetry, and a regimented or “neat” look.

Interestingly, historical formal gardens across the world were large—so large that they could only be seen in whole from above or from a distance. This may be some indication that social class, wealth, access to technological innovation, and metaphors of power and control played a part in the development of formal gardens.

An informal garden isn’t so buttoned up. Think of a photo of a formal garden, but the camera lens had smudges. In an informal garden, beds, paths, and views have curved or organic shapes. The planting is diverse and seems spontaneous; the garden structures use natural materials. Naturalistic gardens are often described as ‘softer’ and ‘relaxed.’ Naturalistic gardens, usually have a higher tolerance for wildlife or incorporate wildlife in the design (e.g., bug snugs, bee hotels, brush piles.).

A naturalistic garden can mean two things: an approach to planting that considers the local ecology or a style of planting that artistically mimics how plants might grow in a wild environment. Often, a naturalistic garden combines both.

An invasive species is a:

• living organism, that is

• not native to an ecosystem, and

• causes or is likely to cause harm.

The harm may be to the ecosystem, the local economy or agriculture, and/or human health. Often, invasive species have no local competition, predator, herbivore, or pathogen. If their growth and spread goes unmanaged, they can crowd out native species. This reduces the ecological biodiversity and health of the invaded ecosystem. Learn more here.

For garden design clients: Good Friend will never recommend or use any plant on the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation’s invasive species list, burning bush (euonymus alatus), or callery pear (pyrus calleryana dcne)—even if the plant was bred to be sterile. If an invasive species is already on-site, Good Friend will advise on graduated suppression and/or removal strategies that do not use herbicides and that minizine soil disturbance.

Keystone species are organisms that play an outsize role in their ecosystem. Think of an ecosystem like spider web, the web is more densely woven and stickier where the keystone species are.

Keystone plants have a direct impact on other species. Keystones also serve multiple purposes across different species, from food, shelter, and erosion control, to insect incubation sites and protective cover.

All keystone plants are natives, but not all natives are keystones.

An annual plant is one that goes from being a seed to producing seed and dying in one year.

A biennial plant takes two years to complete its life cycle. Biennials will sprout and grow roots and leaves the first year. In the second year they will flower, go to seed, and die.

Many annuals and biennials are known to self-seed, sometimes with the help of birds and other animals. These plants can come up around the garden, year after year.

A perennial (which also includes shrubs and trees) has a recurring lifecycle. The same plant returns with flower, fruit, and seed year after year. Perennials can be short-lived, like rudbeckia or echinacea (3-5 years), or many decades old, like an oak or peony (100+).

To ‘treat a plant as an annual’ usually means one of two things. The first, that the specific value of a plant to a garden is in a single growing season (e.g., spinach grown for its leaves). The second is treating a plant that is perennial in its native ecosystem as an annual, since it will not survive overwinter on its own in New York (e.g., tomatoes and dahlias, native to Mexico and Central America).

Native plants and animals have evolved with and adapted to a local ecosystem over thousands of years. New York’s level II ecoregion is the Eastern Temperate Forest/Mixed Wood Plains. The Capital District lies across three level III ecoregions, the Northeastern Highlands, the Northeastern Coastal Zone, and the Eastern Great Lakes Lowlands.

Some consider the cut off point of nativity to be plants present in an ecosystem before European colonization. But this framing may too human-centric to appreciate the complexity of ecology, adaptation, resilience, and evolution.

Native plants have an essential relationship with an ecosystem’s geological history (e.g., climate, soil, and water conditions) and with native microbes and wildlife. Natives are usually the most sustainable, resilient and ecologically beneficial plants in a garden.

Learn more here.

Non-native plants evolved to conditions in another ecosystem, usually in another terrestrial biome.

A non-native plant naturalizes when it can survive and reproduce on its own in an ecosystem outside of its native one. Although scientists disagree on how long it takes for a plant to be considered naturalized, most agree that a naturalized plant coexists alongside native species and does not cause harm to its adopted ecosystem. This is different from a non-native considered an invasive species.

A nativar is a native plant that a breeder or geneticist has developed for certain traits—from color and growing habit, to pest resistance and size. It is yet unclear whether nativars are as ecologically useful or environmentally responsible as native plants (also called ‘straight species’). Using nativars in a landscape intended to maximize ecological benefit requires careful research into their breeding and consumer education. Learn more here.

A garden design can have high- and low-maintenance needs, but there is no such thing as a no-maintenance garden, even in a small garden. A garden is not a wild space, but a curated one.

Maintenance includes pinching, pruning, training, staking, harvesting, and water management strategies. A garden that is trying to achieve a specific outcome—like maximizing edible flowers or fruit, producing cannabis resin, or keeping plants in a particular shape—will require the most maintenance. A native perennial garden will require substantially less.

Management treats the site and the local ecosystem as a design partner. Management includes native habitat restoration and conservation strategies.

An ornamental garden is one that prioritizes appearance more than its edible or medicinal value. In some cases, an ornamental garden has a specific horticultural purpose or sensory priority (e.g., a native garden, an all-white garden, a ‘please-touch’ garden, or a fragrance garden.)

For most of horticultural history, gardens have had edible, medicinal, spiritual, and ornamental priorities, all in one. A garden never need be one thing or another, but can be many things.

Language matters. So, it has always been a shame to me that the other name for soil is ‘dirt’—and we use terms like ‘soiled’ or ‘dirty’ to mean something negative. Soil is vital to life on earth; there is nothing negative about it.

In its simplest definition, soil is a living and complex material made up of organic matter, gases, water, microbes, and organisms. Soil is, itself, a living habitat and supports billions of life forms in a single handful.

The composition, depth, and biodiversity of soil will determine which and how plants will grow. This is why, when designing a garden, the status and health of the soil is the where we start.

No plant is inherently good or bad—they just are, busy living their lives and minding their business. A weed is any plant growing where you don’t want it to be. Whether we like where and what it is, is another story.

Plants that some consider weeds were once used as medicine or food crops. (e.g., dandelion and plantain). Some of weeds are even native New York species (e.g., jewelweed and milkweed). Other weeds, are becoming fashionable (e.g., yarrow and purslane), while others provide tremendous ecological and agricultural value (e.g., clover).

In short, ‘weeds’ are more about us humans than about the plants themselves.

A Note on Invasives vs. Weeds: Few ‘weeds’ are invasive species. Invasive species must be responsibly managed and/or removed.