At Home with Native Plants
by Colleen Fitzpatrick Michelson

Landscape designer Larry Weaner acknowledges that naturalistic landscape designs can ride a fine line between graceful beauty and unruliness, and that the concept can be misunderstood.

“Too often, random informality passes for ‘natural,’ when in reality nature is highly ordered and anything but random,” Weaner wrote in the February 2010 issue of CHS Newsletter. “Understanding this order and using it in our designs is the key to making natural design workable and successful. This does not mean, however, that we must design exclusively with native plants, attempt to copy nature exactly or exclude the influences of other design styles.”

Weaner will urge his audience to discover how to use Connecticut’s native flora to achieve landscapes that are beautiful, diverse, low maintenance and are easy on the environment.

He will explore the ecological processes that occur in the Nutmeg State’s native woodlands, shrub lands and meadows, and illustrate how they can be applied to various residential landscapes. He will highlight solutions to common landscape problems, including entrance areas and screen and bank plantings. And he will describe how to establish native wildflower meadows and woodland gardens in the appropriate context.     

Weaner has been creating native landscapes throughout the eastern United States since 1977.  His award-winning firm, Larry Weaner Landscape Associates in Glenside, Penn., has a national reputation for combining ecological restoration with the traditions of fine garden design.

In 2008, the firm received the top three design awards from the Association of Professional Landscape Designers. In 2009, he received the New England Wild Flower Society’s landscape design award for a property in Salisbury, Conn., that features extensive meadows.

Other projects close to home include creating gardens for a 17th century residence in Danbury and for a natural-areas public park in the center of Wilton. Along the Taconic Parkway, he designed and installed a series of native meadow plantings.

High-profile clients have included Bruce and Patti Springsteen of Freehold, N.J., where plantings focused on ecological restoration and meadows.

He is a guest lecturer and instructor for horticultural and environmental organizations throughout the United States. His landscapes and gardens have been toured by many organizations, including The Garden Conservancy and the American Horticultural Society.

In 1990, Weaner founded New Directions in the American Landscape, a nonprofit educational programming series with a national following among landscape professionals.

Read what Jane Garmey writing in The New York Times had to say about Larry Weaner.