10/12/2026
The shapes shift. I spent a good part of the weekend editing and planting in the . I thought a lot about just how much this 5,000 sqft patch over nearly the last decade has taught me about site-specific design. What's amazing to me is how durable the vision has remained despite dramatic changes in the route from planting to present. The planting patterns endure, but often beyond the shapes they initially occupied. We don't see the point in restraining the very abundance we've endeavored to create, even as we reserve the right to engage with it. The "big picture" spatial ideas were relatively straightforward: use the existing oak and hackberry canopies to frame the gradient from savanna edge to prairie; plot the principal matrix species on an x-shape drawn between the four corners of the patch; create a path that kept tighter to the house and intersected every arm of the "x".
That flexible scaffold has permitted a flourishing palette of 130+ taxa to make sense while providing ever-unfolding complexity for the creatures we share this place with. We're blessed with connection to a greater landscape mosaic, which readily reminds us of the value of a clearing along these otherwise oak-covered hills above the Des Moines River. We've crested the migratory peak for warblers and vireos, but we still enjoy morning gatherings of white-throated sparrows, cedar waxwings, and even a handful of lingering ruby-crowned kinglets, all zipping through this space as they move between the hedgerows on two of its sides.
