Edaphic Garden Consulting
Projects

Gardens, season by season.

A growing showcase of ecological native gardens. It begins close to home, with my own front-yard conversion, and expands to client projects as they take shape.

Featured · The home garden

Front Yard Revamp

Location
Wethersfield, CT
Started
2025
Approach
Native plantings, soil-first conversion from lawn, right plant-right place for sun tolerance
Highlights
Pollinator roadside garden, woodland edge, spring ephemeral layer, rock garden, pondless water feature, brick walkway

What's now a soil-first native garden began as conventional front lawn. Today it reads as a series of connected spaces: a pollinator-friendly roadside border, a shaded woodland edge with a spring-ephemeral layer, a sunny rock garden, and a pondless water feature, all linked by a brick walkway.

Hand-drawn design rendering of the front-yard garden: a planting plan showing specimen trees, mixed pollinator borders, hatched beds, stone paths, and a pondless water feature + View
In the ground · Second spring The front-yard woodland edge in spring: Wild Geranium, Foamflower, and Christmas fern with Woodland Phlox and Golden Groundsel behind + View

The woodland edge in its second spring: Wild Geranium, Foamflower, and Christmas fern, with Woodland Phlox and Golden Groundsel behind.

Rock garden · Water feature A bubbling boulder pondless water feature set in a gravel-and-stone rock garden, with native Eastern prickly pear cactus in yellow bloom in the foreground + View

The pondless water feature in the rock garden, with native Eastern prickly pear (Opuntia) in bloom alongside it.

Jack-in-the-pulpit (Arisaema triphyllum), its striped green-and-maroon hooded spathe rising from leaf-mulch in the woodland planting + View

Jack-in-the-pulpit (Arisaema triphyllum) in the woodland layer.

Delicate violet harebell (Campanula rotundifolia) flowers and buds nodding among the stones of the rock garden + View

Harebell (Campanula rotundifolia) in the rock garden.

Two small native pollinators foraging on the lavender tubular flowers of Bradbury's bee balm (Monarda bradburyana) + View

Native pollinators on Bradbury's bee balm (Monarda bradburyana).

Recent work

A look at recent projects.

A growing record of gardens across the region: from early design renderings to plantings going in the ground.

Planting plan rendering for a Simsbury garden: wisteria-draped arbor gate flanked by pink and gold yarrow borders, with a flagstone path leading into a woodland-edge backyard + View

Entryway and Trellis Garden

Simsbury, CT · Design Rendering

A sunny hillside at the woodland edge in Glastonbury during installation: potted native shrubs and perennials spaced out across the slope ready for planting, with a rock-edged mulch path along the left + View

Hillside Erosion-Control Planting

Glastonbury, CT · Garden Installation

From the field

Notes from the garden.

An ongoing record from around the garden — plants, pollinators, and ecology at work through the seasons. Click any image for the full-size view.

Serviceberry flowers Spring · Serviceberry Lady beetle and aphids Integrated pest management · Predators at work Marsh marigold Pond edge · Marsh marigold A blue flag iris (Iris versicolor) in bloom, its violet petals veined with purple and marked with yellow, against a backdrop of green sword-like leaves Early summer · Blue flag iris Native bee on chokeberry Early summer · Chokeberry Bee on swamp milkweed Summer · Swamp milkweed A bright yellow male American goldfinch perched among purple coneflowers (Echinacea purpurea), feeding on a spent seed head Summer · Goldfinch on coneflower A painted lady butterfly with orange-and-brown patterned wings perched on the red-pink central cone of a purple coneflower (Echinacea purpurea) Summer · Painted lady on coneflower A dark spicebush swallowtail butterfly, wings raised, feeding on the orange central cone of a pink purple coneflower (Echinacea purpurea) Summer · Spicebush swallowtail A silver-spotted skipper, brown with a bright white patch on its wing, perched beneath the lavender-pink bloom of wild bergamot (Monarda fistulosa) Summer · Silver-spotted skipper An orange skipper butterfly perched atop the mauve-pink flower clusters of Joe Pye weed (Eutrochium) Late summer · Joe Pye weed A bumble bee foraging on the pink flower spike of summersweet (Clethra alnifolia), surrounded by glossy green foliage Late summer · Summersweet Bee on aster Fall · Aromatic aster
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