Planting & Garden Design

A border designed for May is a photograph; a border designed for the year is a garden. Our planting plans are drawn month by month: what carries April, what holds July's heat, what colors October, and, hardest of all, what gives January a reason to look out the window. Bark, seed heads, evergreen structure, and the low winter sun do more for a Kentucky garden than any June perennial.

We build plans in layers the way the woodland does. Canopy first: oaks, hickories, and the trees your grandchildren will know. Understory second: redbud, serviceberry, and dogwood, the spring the Bluegrass is famous for. Then the shrub layer for mass and winter bone, and finally the ground plane, where sedges and dropseed have replaced mulch as the modern garden's floor. A bed built this way needs less water, fewer chemicals, and dramatically less fussing than the annuals-and-mulch cycle it replaces.

Our default palette is native-forward, about two-thirds Kentucky and Upland South natives with proven garden cultivars carrying the rest. That ratio is horticultural, not political: natives root into this limestone and this rainfall pattern without argument, and they bring the birds and pollinators that make a garden feel inhabited.

Every planting plan names species, cultivars, sizes, and quantities, and every plant we install carries our establishment guarantee through its first year. The palette strips you see on our garden pages are the actual working documents; we present plants to clients like a materials board, Latin names and all, because you should know your garden on a first-name basis.