Native & Edible Landscape Design Services
+Mini Nursery
We believe your landscape beds can be beautiful and provide essential ecosystem function. We’ll optimize selection and placement for your site and soil type, ensuring blooms across as much of the growing season as possible to service our insect friends.
We can even help you incorporate perennial fruits and herbs too! Imagine a self-pollinating Sun Gold Nectarine tree, giving you a mid-summer harvest of juicy fruits where a traditional designer might place a Japanese Maple which would serve virtually no ecosystem value. Birds can’t eat it’s fruits, bees can’t take its pollen back to their hives. Imagine strawberries and herbs as ground cover instead of boring Ajuga or Creeping Jenny.
Get help visualizing your space.
With optional artist renderings of your design, you can view your new space come to life before you take the next step. These, like all of our designs, will be made to-scale and custom overlayed on images from your property.
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Serving Harnett, Johnston, and surrounding counties in North Carolina
Why a mini nursery?
Happy, healthy, native perennials are simply hard to find.
The nursery began as a way for us to grow out the perfect selection of native grasses and flowers to re-wild around a half acre of yard that we were simply stuck mowing every week. One year, we simply stopped mowing it except for a long, windy pathway right down the center and along the treeline edges. And it was beautiful! It inspired us to find a way to convert the meadow into a tapestry of native wildflowers with blooms across the entire growing season to support as many bees and insects as possible. But, finding enough native perennial PLUGS (that’s important, more on that in a second) locally was impossible, and trying to buy them online was cost prohibitive. I already start hundreds of cut flowers indoors each year, why not try to grow natives? That’s exactly what we did, and the nursery was born.
There are a few things that we do differently, and we think that difference matters.
First and foremost, we don’t have plants available year-round. We carefully time the start of each species so that they are ready to plant out in early fall. In our climate, here in North Carolina, this gives them the perfect amount of time to get settled while the temperatures are starting to ease and the rains are starting to return. Planting natives in spring here without irrigation is just too much for those poor little guys. And we don’t want you to have to irrigate them, that’s the whole point! Selecting species that adapted themselves to our growing conditions means you don’t have to baby them year after year.
Secondly, we don’t grow in rich seed starting mix in perfectly controlled greenhouses. Yes, this means that we lose more plants than the big guys but it also means that our plants are less likely to experience shock when you transplant them at home. We grow them closer to the conditions that they will live out their long lives in, simply providing some dappled shade and irrigation while they focus on growing their first healthy roots.
Buying from us…
In late summer to early fall, we’ll have perfectly curated plug trays available for purchase at local farmers markets and through this site. We’ve been to plenty of native plant sales and come home excited with our prizes only to find out that everything we picked is going to bloom all at the same time, leaving the insects and ourselves disappointed during the rest of the growing season months with a sea of green. Or worse, one or two plants wants way more water than the others making maintenance a headache. We’ve learned our lesson and we’ll help make it easy for you to avoid the same mistakes. Our plug trays will have 5-6 varieties that are all designed to thrive together, from their root systems all the way up to their blooms. We’ll have a handful of options to choose from with photos and information cards for each plant.
More information will be released when the plants are ready. Sign up below to receive updates as we get closer!