Shrouded in Light: Naturalistic Planting Inspired by Wild Shrublands

For decades, perennial meadows and prairies have inspired naturalistic planting design and now it’s the turn of shrublands to stimulate a new paradigm in garden design.

Shrubs have a raw beauty and wild ’otherness’ that make them a striking presence in the landscape and a rich source of inspiration for gardeners. Shrubs are tough: they thrive in the hottest of deserts roadcuts, make homes in abandoned pasture, and march reliably northward as we warm the earth.

Shrubs excel at sharing communities with other living things and this book demonstrates how their adaptability and reciprocities are so valuable in a time of global climate change. Profiling 12 wild shrublands from the US and beyond, the authors identify the key shrubs and companion plants that define each plant community and the design take-aways including substitutions appropriate for a range of climates.

The final section showcases gardens that exemplify new ways of gardening with shrubs. This book is a call to incorporate the aesthetic lessons from shrubscapes into our planted spaces and also a deeper challenge to bring their collaborative way of being into practice.

Kevin Philip Williams is a gardener who partners with plants to create dynamic, resilient and challenging worlds. Kevin is an Assistant Curator for Denver Botanic Gardens. He holds an MS in Public Horticulture from the Longwood Graduate Program in Public Horticulture at The University of Delaware and a BA in The History and Philosophy of Science from Bard College. Kevin worked as a Gardener on The High Line in Manhattan and studied as a Horticulture Intern at Brooklyn Botanic Garden.

Michael Guidi is a Horticulturist for the Denver Botanic Gardens where he manages gardens that showcase living collections from Western North America. He is broadly interested in temperate arid-land flora and ecology and focuses his horticultural ambitions on creating naturalistic, dynamic habitats in the garden. He is currently a master’s degree candidate in the Graduate Degree Program in Ecology at Colorado State University.