THE “WHAT PLANT GOES WHERE?” aspect of gardening is the hardest part for a lot of us. And as we increasingly shift our plant palette and gardening style to more native and ecologically focused, decisions about design might seem even a little trickier. We want our landscape to be abundant and biodiverse, packed with life—but also to still hang together visually.

We want it to be legible, and today’s guest, landscape designer Leslie Needham, has advice to help us achieve that legibility—to make our gardens really read, and draw the eye and the visitor through them effectively.

Leslie Needham is the founder of Leslie Needham Design in Bedford, N.Y., a 20-year-old landscape firm, and has also taught landscape design at the New York Botanical Garden Landscape Design Program, where she was accredited. Just this year, Leslie was one of the featured presenters in the 12-week “Less Lawn More Life Challenge” that we’ll tell you a little about, just another of the many ways she shares her knowledge and tactical advice for making gardens that work both ecologically and aesthetically.
Read along as you listen to the Sept. 22, 2025 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on Apple Podcasts (iTunes) or Spotify (and browse my archive of podcasts here).

is your garden legible? tips from leslie needham

Margaret Roach: I was glad to have a chance to get better acquainted with you recently when I was writing a “New York Times” story about the “Less Lawn More Life Challenge” that I was just referring to in the introduction, sort of a digital self-test [photo below] and a little bit of a curriculum, a 12-week self-help self-instruction course from this company called Plan it Wild. And I can give information about that, including a link to your video that you did one of the weeks. But that was kind of fun. It was great to connect and get some advice from you and I wanted more and that’s why we’re here today [laughter].

Leslie Needham: Great. It is fun. I have to say, I think the whole Plan it Wild tutorial and the 12 steps has been really engaging, and it does make it fun and approachable, and I think that’s the whole goal of all of this.

Margaret: And there’s just a really great cast of collaborators involved, Homegrown National Park, Doug Tallamy’s group, and Wild Ones, the venerable membership group around the country, and Pollinator Partnership and so forth; lots of other impressive groups involved. Yeah, and we’ll tell everybody about it, but not to derail into that, just to say that I was glad that that connected us, Leslie.

Leslie: Indeed.

Margaret: And so your topic in that challenge, in that 12-week challenge, was legibility. And so what makes a garden beautiful and what makes it hang together? It’s sort of been shifting in recent years, hasn’t it?

Leslie: It has. And I think that’s what’s really exciting. I would say the paradigm of what constitutes a beautiful garden is very different from when I first started gardening at my house 23 years ago. I think people appreciate the fact that you’re not just planting for yourself. When you bring a plant into a garden now, so many people think, “O.K., I think it’s beautiful, but is it also going to feed the local birds, the local bugs? Is it going to be part of my larger ecosystem?” And I think that’s really exciting, and you see that in the plant offerings as well. I mean, there’s so many incredible sources for native plug plants. So it’s been a really exciting shift. Yes,

Margaret: Yes. So I guess I’ll just say, where do we start? I want to get lots of your tips. But it’s fall approaching, and I always think of that as a really good time to kind of take stock, look around, walk around your garden, take some notes, etc. Especially for those of us who don’t remember to take notes when things happen during the year [laughter].

Leslie: Yeah, I think I totally agree with you. I think fall is a really great time. But the great thing is when you move to a wilder landscape, more nature-based, there is so much more to observe. I mean beyond the plants, you bring in so much wildlife, both in the small bugs and the birds, but also animals that are making habitat.

So I think fall is a really great time to walk around and see, well, is anyone else in here? And you will start to see, I’m seeing… Well, the migrating birds are now, but a month ago the finches moved into an area where I planted so much more Echinacea. So I make those observations also observe like, oh, this looks good and this seems to be working, or maybe that plant hasn’t taken off. So you make those kind of observations.

Think about your goals, and one of my goals is always how do I reduce lawn when I’m working on a property? And one of my greatest cheat tricks is taking drone photographs. And they don’t have to be fancy. If you don’t have a drone, I promise you, you can probably find a kid that you can hire, and it gives you this great bird’s-eye perspective of your property or an area. And a lot of times designers start by bird’s-eye, even though you don’t experience a landscape by a bird’s-eye, but you see connections, you see areas that, ooh, maybe I could shrink this lawn by extending this shrub border. Or I can make a path here so therefore I don’t need any of this lawn; I could erase it all if I just switched to a path. And a drone is a great way to see those connections and opportunities.

Margaret: That’s kind of fun. That’s great. And to be able to see again that bird’s-eye view. Yeah, that’s kind of a fun idea.

Leslie: It is. And then another little hack I have is I think we all take tons of pictures in our gardens, and sometimes you take them when everything’s in bloom and you get distracted by how colorful and fabulous everything looks. But if you switch some of those colored photographs into black and white, it lets you see structure a lot more.

And you may say like,  oh, actually that really fabulous pink-blooming whatever, it’s just lying in the middle of the path; if I could cut it back or clear it. You see the structure when you switch to black and white.

So those are two tricks I use. And I actually do a lot of that this time of year, because luckily things are a little quieter. I’m still watering like mad, but I can start to pull back and think about edits that I want to make. And if I do want to plant some things, it’s also a great time to bring in shrubs and even plugs. I’m doing that down in the orchard now.

Margaret: Was your home garden once more formal, sort of more of a more traditional ornamental-focused garden than it is?

Leslie: It was.

Margaret: O.K. So you’ve gone through this shift yourself on your home property as well?

Leslie: Well, I am going through it still, and I talk about it actually. When I give talks on my garden, I show the influence. I was lucky 25 years ago—I would travel to Europe and I’d see these very formal English gardens and I loved it. I still love them. But I’d come back and I think, O.K., I want the hedges, I want the boxwood. I still have many of those remnants, but it’s such a small percentage now to my overall planting than it was.

But I think it’s the perspective of aging. It’s like, oh, that was beautiful; that was beautiful then. But it’s not what drives me at all anymore. And I will say that I think you can evolve, and I think a garden—you don’t have to do it all at once, and I can’t rip everything out that I have. But I can start to shift so that my plant palette is, if the sweet spot is 70 percent native beneficial plants, I can do that by really considering everything I’m bringing in now. And it’s not boxwood anymore.

Margaret: [Laughter.] So years ago, friends of mine who are garden designers from Seattle, they came in and one of the things they said to me was when I was first making my garden, they said—because we were walking around outside—they were like, “Well, we can’t start here. We need to go inside and look out the window, from key windows in the house.” So one of their things—and each designer has their own tips, so to speak, mantras—and they said, “Where do you sit? Where do you spend your time? Where do you see this garden from, Margaret when you’re not crawling around on your hands and knees in it?”

And they were like, “Go inside, look out the window and let’s frame some nice views for you to appreciate your handiwork when you go inside.” So that was one of their tips.

So what you have in the video that you did for the series that we talked about, the “Less Lawn More Life Challenge,” you gave a number of tips like that about sort of conscious things that would have aesthetic impact and help to organize what we saw in the garden.

Leslie: And I do agree with your friend, absolutely. And when I design as well, I really think about how it is experienced from inside, because I really think an successful and engaging landscape is really an extension of the house. And I think this gets into sort of the goal of blurring the edges. I mean, I think there’s a house vernacular which then translates into a landscape vernacular, and they should all be settled together. So I agree, you need to look at your views from inside.

But then as you go out, you want to lead people through these landscapes, and these nature-based landscapes can be wilder, and you can benefit from putting in paths. And I think that’s a very easy first thing to do, is even if you mow a path through high plantings, it leads you through, it takes your eye through the landscape. And it also just makes it look intentional, more cared for But that’s a really easy thing to do.

And then I also think it’s important to have sort of focal points in these wilder landscapes. And they can be anything from a chair that’s tucked under a tree in a bed of ferns. I actually have that at my house. Or a pot that takes your eye and focuses it. Or a pair of pots or a pair of finials that then frame a view to beyond. So those are really simple tricks to work in these, as I say, wilder landscapes and they work and they’re pretty easy to do, too.

Margaret: So to really sort of direct the eye and the visitor—to beckon, to say, “Come over here, look this way,” and frame a picture, a desired picture beyond that. Whether it’s a pair of finials, as you say, or gate posts or whatever the heck it is that announce this thing beyond, this view beyond, or just the path in some cases works that way.

Leslie: Yeah. Then the other thing is, I think is so important is places to sit in these landscapes, because there’s a heartbeat beyond the plants. And so if you give in a woodland small bench, or in an orchard a couple of chairs, you start to engage with the birds and observation of this habitat you’re creating. And that’s really special, and it’s actually really rewarding and kind of easy [laughter]. So I always work on getting seats throughout the garden, not just in one place. And it can just be a little perch, but I think that’s really, really important. You do get to enjoy the reason that you’re planting this way.

Margaret: That intimacy to sit there and be still and watch and listen for who else is with you, who’s doing what in the garden. Yeah, I think when we spoke for the Times story, you talked about maybe even making a wider space within some paths, like a circle or something?

Leslie: And I’ve done it. I had the experience just doing our orchard this summer. We had a wedding, and we had to have a lot of people in our orchard, and we’ve always had just about this 5-foot path that meandered through. But we then took this path and then mowed a couple of really big circles where people could gather.

And it has changed the whole experience. I’m so excited. I mean, this is what I love about gardening. You’re learning. Twenty-three years we’ve been on this property, but I’m still discovering new ways to approach it. And that’s a really easy thing to do. You just take a path and in certain areas just I create a circle. It’s perfect for putting four Adirondack chairs, or a fire pit. So that’s another really simple way. You don’t even have to bring in the masonry. You can change your locations year to year. It’s a very fun and easy way to experience the landscape.

Margaret: In the video you mentioned—when you speaking about mowing a path or using masonry or gravel or whatever—you talk about crisp edges and how they also help to define a place.

Leslie: Indeed. And I think that’s something I hear as when I’m talking to clients or people, it’s like, “Oh, but does it just look like a big mess?” Everything gets so tall and it flops. And I think if you do do the crisp edges, I sometimes have stone paths that go right leading through it—it’s that good yin and yang—or a gravel terrace. The plants might be kind of messy, but it’s held in place or it’s counterbalanced by a very strict rectangular gravel terrace.

So I think crisp edges are important. And sometimes you even need to mow. I have meadows that might go to the property and just mowing a surround of 4 feet that surrounds that edge can make it look neater, too, and not like it’s just like an unkempt portion of a property. I do think that crisp edge can help a lot.

Margaret: Now, I suspect, I don’t know, I haven’t seen hundreds of pictures yet [laughter] of all your landscapes in every single instance, but I suspect that your beds, so to speak, of plants that I’m not going to see mulch, mulch, mulch, mulch, mulch, as in bagged stuff, right?

Leslie: No, not at all. And I laugh because I think we’re all so aware of the plastic in the world and in our bodies. But I also think we have to think about the plastic that we’re bringing into our landscapes, i.e., in the mulch and the fertilizers and the food. And think about if we close the loop, I bet we could reduce that considerably if not completely. So I do not bring in mulch anymore. I do mulch my leaves, I leave my leaves in perennial beds for the winter. But I also plant so heavily now—we call it green mulch—that when things start to grow, you don’t really see ground.

And one, it’s aesthetically such so much more pleasing. I’m totally off that look of lots of mulch in a bed. I think we can do it better. And you don’t have to weed as much. It holds the water. And also if your matrix of these thick plantings includes things like Carex and everything, it has such long seasonal beauty because they are this beautiful gold throughout my beds in the winter as they dry. So I think there’s so many better ways to have mulch, i.e., green mulch—plants—and everything in a bed, than just bagged mulch.

Margaret: I always loved years ago, Claudia West, the designer from Phyto design [Phyto Studio], she said, “Plants are the mulch, Margaret.” She said, “Plants are the mulch.” [Laughter.]

Leslie: And they are. Like a Carex albicans next to a hellebore: They look so beautiful together. It’s like art as well. And they are. And once you start to do that—and again, this is something I wasn’t doing when I first started gardening—you really have fun with it. And you start looking for partnership plants that look great in perennial beds and borders together.

Margaret: So we’re looking for some focal areas that we want to direct the eye to. We’re going to frame some views. We’re going to make paths. We’re going to invite our eye and our visitors and ourselves in. We’re going to make seating areas. We’re going to keep some of the edges crisper.

And what other kinds of things, if you’re walking with a client through a garden at this time of year, what are some of the other things that you’re looking for in terms of eventual tweaks or advice or whatever—or that you’re thinking about in your own garden?

Leslie: Well, one thing is talking about blurring the edges. And I think it’s really exciting—and Doug Tallamy is very much about this—our connected landscapes. But I think there’s this great opportunity in the suburban areas that we live in, the roadsides, which are usually mowed lawn, but if we all started to plant these out with more combinations of native small shrubs—I know towns need to sometimes cut in those areas, but native perennials—we could start to connect landscapes in communities so easily and make it so pretty. So that’s one thing I’m thinking about is how do we continue to blur edges?

Margaret: So blur the edges, meaning? Tell me a little bit more about that, give me examples of what blurring the edges is.

Leslie: Well, I think blurring the edges is making it so that when you drive by a landscape, you can’t say like, “Oh, their property begins here and ends there,” because the plant material will bleed; hopefully their neighbor’s on board with this, too. So they may have some sort of viburnum that goes through their woodland, the native viburnum, some winterberry, but it doesn’t end at my property, but it blurs to the next one.

And I think a really easy place to start this are those mowed grassways that are around along every roadside suburban areas. And we’re starting it in a few places in our town, and I love it. And I think it’s kind of an easy and fun way to start planting in a more naturalistic manner, and also kind of get to know your neighbors, because people are working on these together like, “Oh, I’m doing this. Would you want to do it?” And it’s fun.

Margaret: O.K. So that’s another one then. I assume that when you first studied landscape design, the advice was probably a list of tools, so to speak, design tricks or tools or practices. I don’t know if they all still apply, or they’ve evolved.

Leslie: Well, they have evolved, but I think design is based also on some practical and also geometry. As I say, when I look at the front of a house, I do not put planting all against the house. The rule, and I still think it works, is take your front of your house and flip it down. And your planting should really work around that area, so don’t plant all right up against your house.

Margaret: So take the front of your house, flip it down, I’m sorry; take your front of your house and flip it down, meaning?

Leslie: Flip it down. And so if your house is 20 feet, you go down and that’s 20 feet, that’s all to where you plant. That 20 feet provides you sort of an entrance and a plinth on which to settle your house. And I think in this more naturalistic landscaping, that’s a really good thing.

I mean, naturalistic can kind of be larger gestures, so give yourself space to do it. Don’t just, as I say, plant right at the edge of your house.

Margaret: Because what we saw in the post-World War II initial templated suburban communities, was stuff practically glued to the front facade of the house [laughter], as they called it: “foundation planting.” Well named.

Leslie: Right. And actually, once you step away from that, first of all, you’re like, “Oh yeah, this makes so much sense,” because it gives you breathing room and it creates a beautiful plinth, as I said, for your house to sit on. And so I mean, I think that’s really important is making sure that you work in a large scale immediately around your house, large in proportion to your house, like flipping it over. I think that’s a really important first step.

Margaret: The other place that I see a lot of times when I visit people’s gardens and they’re getting started and they ask questions and so forth-

I didn’t know what I was doing when I first came here to the place I am decades ago. But for some reason I ended up doing this thing that turned out to be both attractive and ecologically sound. A lot of times we mow right to the edges of our property and there will be like a back fence and a side fence, sort of these areas that don’t have much use sometimes, because again, they’re the perimeter. But if they were planted, especially with things that were good for wildlife, they could be edge habitat—ecotone, as they call it in science—the place where all the action is, where the insects…

And so these are mixed shrubs and vines with herbaceous things below and so forth. And I made these sort of big beds, I sort of came in maybe 15, 20 feet from the edge and just made these giant sort of shrub borders with herbaceous stuff underneath. And it turns out that’s where everybody always is, all the birds and everybody’s nesting and eating winterberry fruit and you know what I mean?

And so sometimes that area’s wasted. It’s like we’re mowing, we’re pushing that lawnmower right up to the edge, and we could grab 10 feet there.

Leslie: Exactly. And that’s the other thing thinking about when you do these more naturalistic landscapes is the maintenance requirements and the materials that are needed and how we’re going to care for them. And if you do that, it really does take a lot less care.

Margaret: Absolutely. Totally, totally.

Leslie: I think that’s a real benefit of this. I’m not saying they are maintenance-free because no landscape, once you start to work on it is maintenance-free, but that is a lot less maintenance. And then hopefully your neighbor says like, “Oh, that looks really good. And they’re not out mowing that every weekend. Maybe I should do that.”

And that’s where I think this blurring the edges, these extended shared habitats, is pretty exciting. And I do think that’s happening; I do think it’s happening.

Margaret: Is there one last thing you just want to quickly tell us to be on the lookout for?

Leslie: Well, I am excited. I think this is a real movement, and I would say get out: Walk your own property with an eye to toward the many animals and bugs and birds that make it their home ,and how you can modify it or work on it and improve it for them as well. And you’ll find lots of little things, as you say: Plant the edges. Go to a new area. Add water in some respect in different areas for the birds. Just look at your landscape from a slightly wider perspective on who’s going to be enjoying it.

Margaret: Good advice—and who you’re going to get to meet, which is kind of fun.

Leslie: Yes, exactly. Yes.

Margaret: Well, Leslie, I’m so glad to speak to you, and I enjoyed your video, one of the weeks of the 12-week “Less Lawn More Life Challenge.” And as I said, I’ll give information about that as well as about your work for Leslie Needham Design and so forth. But it’s been fun talking to you, and I hope I’ll speak to you again soon. Thank you.

Leslie: Thank you, Margaret. I’ve really enjoyed it.

(All photos courtesy of Leslie Needham Design.)

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MY WEEKLY public-radio show, rated a “top-5 garden podcast” by “The Guardian” newspaper in the UK, began its 16th year in March 2025. It’s produced at Robin Hood Radio, the smallest NPR station in the nation. Listen locally in the Hudson Valley (NY)-Berkshires (MA)-Litchfield Hills (CT) Mondays at 8:30 AM Eastern, rerun at 8:30 Saturdays. Or play the Sept. 22, 2025 show using the player near the top of this transcript. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes/Apple Podcasts or Spotify (and browse my archive of podcasts here).