There’s nature, and then there’s natural landscaping. Nature does what it wants, and doesn’t much care where or when a house is built. Natural landscaping is an attempt to borrow from and evoke nature’s own handiwork in creative-and yes, artificial-ways.
“We were building in an old patch of woods, so we felt we ought to preserve as much of that look as we could. But we also wanted to have a yard where our grandchildren could have fun and we could take nice walks in the morning,” says one of the owners of this 2 1/2-acre garden where nature and natural landscaping overlap one another comfortably.
In 1988, designer Craig Anderson of Anderson Landscaping in Mundelein planted astilbes, day lilies and other traditional perennials in flowing, naturalistic groupings. He hauled in eight truckloads of boulders from Wisconsin to give the site the look of land that had never been farmed.
Last year, designer Kerry Leigh of The Natural Garden in St. Charles, Ill., introduced native woodland and prairie plants farther out from the house, knitting the old woods and the new house together even better than before. “There’s a gradual transition from the house to the garden to the woods, and from formal to informal to wild,” Leigh says.
It works. Deer, chipmunks, owls and other locals used to stick to the woods. Now, given a sympathetic garden, they come closer. When there’s a lot of rain, little waterfalls suddenly appear in the artificial streambed, deepening the impression that the rocks were meant to be where they are. Nature provided the wooded backdrop; landscape designers traced a gently curving, almost fluid, path through the garden to take wanderers to the edge of the woods, where they discover a small grotto from which to take in both the pre-existing and the introduced flora.
Worked into the mix are evocative touches like the bed of blue ajuga ground cover laid near a statue to suggest a reflecting pool. “Our ideal is an English cottage garden, but we have arrived at something that is more Midwestern eclectic, I guess,” the owner says.
