Book Club: 3 Must-Read Inspirational Books for Your Naturalistic Garden

These garden design books from Piet Oudolf, John Greenlee, and Thomas Rainier and Claudia West offer guidance and inspiration for your naturalistic garden in spades.

The naturalistic garden has been a top design trend for over a decade, blending the beauty of wild landscapes with thoughtful design. Similar to approaches like the new perennial movement and meadow gardens, it emphasizes native and adaptable plants, layered plantings, and an organic flow. I'm a mega-fan and am using variations of this approach with many clients and also throughout my gardens at Winterhill. To keep things fresh, I love turning to gardening books for inspiration and here are my current favorites for unique takes on the naturalistic garden style.

Dream Plants for the Natural Garden by Henk Gerritsen and Piet Oudolf

I place Piet high on the pedestal for most influential garden designers – his visionary planting design for the High Line is the onus behind my moving to NYC to pursue my master's degree. This particular book, coauthored with his fellow Dutch design guru Henk Gerritsen is the ultimate guide to selecting and pairing plants for a naturalist garden.

The American Meadow Garden by John Greenlee

While it's usually the flowers that get the most attention in a garden, it's the grasses that do the heavy lifting in the design of many naturalistic gardens, especially meadow and prairie-inspired gardens. In this book, John Greenlee offers one of the best, and easiest to understand guides to choosing the right grasses for your meadow garden – along with other essential plantings too.

Planting in a Post-Wild World by Thomas Rainer and Claudia West

I remember when this book came out in 2015 – there was a lot of energy behind the dynamic authors/designers behind the book and the way they had provided such descriptive, step-by-step wording to how to create these fabulously layered, colorful, and ecologically sound naturalistic gardens – which were then becoming all the rage. This book remains one of the best guides to understanding how to create the essential layers, and successional blooming behind a well-orchestrated naturalistic garden using matrix plantings and naturally-occuring plant communities.