The alternative gardener who's now mainstream

“Getting rid of lawns was no longer weird”

Owen Wormser, an ecological landscape designer and author of the book Lawns Into Meadows, used to think of his work as alternative. But since regenerative gardens have become popular, his business is doing so well he was able to build the house he’s always wanted.

For most American kids, living without a TV or indoor plumbing might seem punishing. For Owen Wormser, it was part of what made his childhood so wonderful.

A couple of years before he was born, his parents bought 30 acres in central Maine. It was 1973, and no one much wanted rural land, including the farmers exasperated by the region’s thin, rocky soil. So his parents got the land cheap, at $75 an acre. But it was isolated—and would continue to be. Put off by the cost of installing indoor plumbing and bringing in electricity, the couple decided against both.

Janet and Baron Wormser’s accidental experiment in off-the-grid living lasted 26 years, and their son is grateful for it. Owen, 50, credits his unusual childhood for inspiring him to help others connect with nature through his work as an ecological landscape designer.

His family, which includes an older sister, didn’t get a phone until Owen was eleven, and their closest, and only, neighbor lived a half mile down the road. Without playmates who lived close by or electronic distractions, Owen spent a huge chunk of his free time outdoors and on his own.

Owen, with his parents and sister Maisie, in their book-lined living room in 1989. In addition to holding down jobs and managing life without electricity and plumbing, Janet and Baron Wormser somehow had time to be voracious readers, says Owen.

He snowshoed and cross-country skied through the miles of woods right outside his door. He hiked in search of what he calls “pretty places.” He read books on botany that helped him identify the names of local plants. He learned to track the rabbits, foxes, and occasional bears that traveled past the wood-shingled house his parents had built. “And I spent a lot of time just lying in the grass,” he says, listening to the chatter of the birds amid the quiet of it all.

He’s careful not to romanticize the experience. Going to the outhouse in the middle of a wintry Maine night was a reliable test of fortitude. A house without central heating made getting out of bed in January to load the wood-fired furnace nobody’s favorite job. The family used a hand pump to wash hands and dishes and heated up water in a big tub to bathe. They relied on a root cellar to store food, eventually buying a gas-powered fridge when Owen was 14.

But his mother, a nurse and painter, and his father, a librarian and award-winning poet, were committed to living simply, in harmony with nature. And they wanted their children to share in that experience.

Owen wasn’t always keen on their plan. He remembers resisting his mother’s calls for help in the garden—”like any kid, I didn’t want to do anything”—but was drawn to it nonetheless.

He watched how his mother used kitchen scraps and garden waste to create microbe-rich soil for the vegetables. He saw how planting deep-rooted perennials, including the bright yellow coreopsis and spiky liatris that his mother loved, meant she didn’t have to do much watering. He found himself valuing flowers based in part on how many pollinators they attracted. “I got an enormous boost from being around plants and having it all demystified,” he says.

Owen planted this field, photographed in its sixth year, for The Carle. He did such a good job choosing plants for the site’s tired, hard-packed soil that all of them have shown up and thrived. Owen loves his visits to the meadow. “When you’re in there it’s just this buzz of pollinators,” he says. Featured plants: false aster (Boltonia asteroides), rose mallow (Hibiscus laevis), showy sunflower (Helianthus pauciflorus), purple meadow rue (Thalictrum dasycarpum)

I first spoke with Owen six years ago, after learning about the meadow he planted for The Carle, a children’s museum in Amherst, Massachusetts. I was searching for someone to write a book for Stone Pier Press on how to grow a meadow—something practical enough to help me with my own project in southern Maine. What I found instead were glossy books showcasing picture-perfect meadows that offered little real guidance, aside from noting that many of the featured landscapes relied on herbicides for their good looks.

In Owen I found an eco-gardener with lots of experience designing and installing regenerative landscapes. He’d never written a book but had a mission-oriented approach to creating sustainable yards that I admired, in part because it seemed achievable. In one of our early conversations, he told me that the modern world is so broken up by roads and cities, lawns and farmlands, that even a small meadow can be a refuge for native insects, birds, and wildlife.

Less than a year later, we released Lawns Into Meadows to stellar reviews and packed book release parties on Zoom, with participants numbering in the thousands. It was the summer of 2020, and people were ready to bake their own bread, take up binoculars and birding, and fill their empty lawns with flowers and life. Sales of books purporting to tell us how to do all of this were through the roof.

Owen’s book managed to land on the Amazon bestseller list in its category five times over the next couple of years, inspiring a second edition, this time with photos. The book’s popularity marked a shift in the way Owen thought of himself and his work. “Suddenly, people who wanted to get rid of their lawns were no longer outcasts or weird,” he says.

Owen’s first big meadow project was for Robert Frost’s house in Franconia, New Hampshire. He planted many young flowers and grasses but forgot to mark their locations, and they were soon overtaken by weeds. This photo shows the lupine that grew up because Owen took the precaution of sprinkling in native seeds.

The new enthusiasm for do-it-yourself meadow-making would have astonished a younger Owen. When he studied landscape architecture in the mid-1990s at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, the field valued a design-first approach and designers were expected to hand off plans to other people to implement.

Owen knew he wanted to create landscaping that worked in tandem with nature, and he knew he wanted to work with his hands. He lobbied the chair of his department to take the one course in the school that focused on ecology.

There, he learned a few of the many strategies for promoting wildlife habitat, like cultivating meadows on the edges of farmland. He studied how a perennial plant’s deep roots feed the soil and enable healthy microorganisms to flourish. He saw a future in which he planned landscapes that don’t need fertilizers, herbicides, or much watering to thrive.

“There was something confirmational about the class,” he says. “It fed my impulse to do things that make sense relative to how things work in real life, and that includes plants in nature.”

Owen planted this urban meadow in Northampton after he'd pitched the idea to the city. It agreed to a small trial meadow and, on planting day, volunteers showed up to turn a weedy hill into an embankment of colorful meadow flowers. Owen chose young plants rather than seeds so the meadow would grow up quickly and endear itself to skeptics. It worked. The next year he was asked by the city to expand the new meadow. Featured plants: yarrow (Achillea millefolium ‘Moonshine’), sundrops (Oenothera fruticosa ‘Fireworks'), hairy mountain mint (Pycnanthemum muticum), New York aster (Symphyotrichum novi-belgii)

When he graduated in 1998, he figured his emphasis on ecological gardening would limit his money-making potential—he knew of only five companies in the entire country that offered his brand of landscaping. But he was okay with that. “I was already comfortable in the alternative lane thanks to growing up the way I did.”

He started Abound Design not far from where he’d gone to college and began talking up eco-friendly alternatives to lawns, which he’d decided never to install. Most people pushed back—they weren’t ready to give up what they knew. Another challenge: Almost no one had seen a residential meadow or a garden built around perennials, since so few existed at the time.

This former lawn is now a regenerative garden with the feel of a meadow, thanks to a profusion of perennial grasses. Gardens like these, designed with a slightly wild look, are a popular choice among Owen’s clients. Featured grasses: little bluestem (Schizachyrium scoparium), prairie dropseed (Sporobolus heterolepis)

Owen persevered, and over time he designed and built regenerative landscapes for a number of notable clients, including the Robert Frost home in Franconia, New Hampshire, Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, and, of course, The Carle. His work started attracting the interest of people who liked the idea of a low-maintenance yard that also happened to be beautiful.

Business was steady, if not spectacular. It wasn’t until the pandemic that it really took off. Suddenly, interest in alternatives to lawns soared, and—with the publication of his book—people wanted to know what Owen had to say about it. He started getting inquiries from newspapers, magazines, and podcasts asking him to talk about regenerative landscapes and how to build them.

“For many years, no one really cared,” he says. “But I’m no longer working in a vacuum. It feels great to be part of the conversation.” These days, he’s fielding requests for designing and installing eco-friendly landscapes about 95 percent of the time.

Owen thinks the pandemic gave people time to grapple with the sense of helplessness many of us feel about environmental decline and the worsening climate crisis. Taking control of our own yards and community spaces started to seem like something we could actually do. “I think it dawned on people that ‘I can plant pollinator plants and the bees will show up,’” he says. “And that’s deeply affirming.”

For this Japanese-style garden, Owen added rocks, sand, and plants “that impart a sense of serenity,” he says. “Too much color can be raucous.” The homeowners look out on the garden every day. “It connects them to the landscape and seasons, and it really makes their lives richer, which is my goal for everyone,” he says. Every year, he gets an email from them letting him know how much they enjoy it. Featured plants: dwarf iris (Iris cristata), weeping redbud (Cercis canadensis), weeping larch (Larix decidua ‘Pendula’), Japanese maple (Acer palmatum)

But good intentions don’t always translate into successful gardens. In the five years since his book was first published, Owen has led dozens of workshops and learned what frustrates people about gardening: It’s harder than they expected. “There’s a gap between people’s desire to do this and their ability to pull it off,” he says. That doesn’t surprise him. “Most of us haven’t lived close enough to the natural world to understand how it works,” he adds. “There’s no shame in that.”

And when people do ask for help, it can be hard to find. Staff at nurseries rarely have time to talk through the qualities of specific plants, and most landscaping crews stick to the basics. “They tend to mow, blow, clip hedges, and move on,” says Owen.

“Indigenous cultures are better connected to the earth and have gained knowledge for generations and stored it collectively, so they have vast repositories of information,” he says, “and we’re just working on our own. Our culture has almost zero collective knowledge.”

This meadow sits on a quiet cul-de-sac. The owner initially faced resistance from neighbors so he reached out to explain the plan. Today, a few years later, the neighbors love it. Featured plants: bee balm (Monarda didyma ‘Jacob Cline’), mountain mint (Pycnanthemum muticum), aromatic aster (Symphyotrichum oblongifolium) ‘Raydon’s Favorite’), little bluestem (Schizachyrium scoparium ‘Standing Ovation’)

Two years ago, Owen moved into a house he built in Conway, Massachusetts, that he’d been designing in his mind for years. It’s the realization of a dream made possible by the growing interest in eco-friendly gardens.

The house faces south, so it regularly fills with light, and there’s a big central room for entertaining friends and family. But Owen also likes living on his own and having the space to himself. “I’ve come to a place where time on my own isn’t the absence of others,” he says. “It’s the presence of my own inspiration and the things that keep me going.”

This site began as little more than a yard with a stone fountain. Owen added a pond and stone to create interest and draw the eye. “If stonework is done well, it adds so much character to a landscape,” he says. “It also provides a pleasing contrast to the softness and texture of plants.” Featured plants: Siberian iris (Iris sibirica), foamflower (Tiarella cordifolia), maidenhair fern (Adiantum pedatum), wild ginger (Asarum canadense)

Another reason he relishes the quiet is that it allows for his daily meditation practice, which he has maintained for 26 years. “My life would be so much different without it,” he says. “It has allowed most of the good things in my life to materialize and come through.”

Owen tells me he wants to help others feel the awe that he experienced as a child—lying on his back and looking up at the sky, or snowshoeing alone through the woods. He sees a regenerative landscape as a way to be fully present, to listen—to the buzzing, the singing, the quiet of it all. “I love enabling people to get sucked into just being there, outside, and connecting with what’s around you,” he says. “It’s a way to save a few more butterflies, too.”

Owen used pathways to both add a formal quality to this garden and allow people to interact closely with the plants. Featured plants: poppy (Papaver orientalis ‘Prince of Orange’), cardinal flower (Lobelia cardinalis), anise hyssop (Agastache ‘Blue Boa’), Solomon’s seal (Polygonatum commutatum)

QUESTIONS OWEN HEARS FREQUENTLY

How can I know which plants will do well? Owen recommends choosing plants that tend to thrive in a variety of conditions—what he calls foundational plants. Examples include blue grama grass, purple needle grass, switchgrass, tufted hairgrass, black-eyed Susan, butterfly weed, lupine, purple coneflower, wild bergamot, and more. (Lawns Into Meadows: Second Edition contains a list of 21 foundational plants.)

Start small—plant a stand of flowers and grasses instead of a whole field—and watch what happens. “If your young plant just sits there and doesn’t show signs of growth from spring to summer,” says Owen, “then it definitely isn’t happy.” In that case, pull it out and move on to a different plant.

How do I deal with invasive plants? If you’re clearing a site or cutting back on mowing, invasives will likely become an annoying part of your gardening experience. To get rid of them, it’s important to figure out what you’ll replace them with. “Plants are opportunists,” says Owen. “Change the circumstances by planting something that takes up space and grows the same height or taller, and it won’t want to be there anymore.”

Search for good replacement options online or ask locals for help. “If there are even a handful of people where you live who know the ropes on handling invasives and other bad actors,” says Owen, “you can lean on them and get info.”

My garden doesn’t seem to be growing the way I’d hoped. Owen hears variations on this concern a lot. It can take a while for perennials to become established—meadows grown from seed, for instance, can take up to five years to mature. Patience is important even for young plants, though you can usually get a good read on them in their first full season. Too often, says Owen, people pull the plug on their gardening efforts before giving plants a real chance.

I’m new to regenerative gardening. How do I get started? Building up what Owen calls “ecological literacy” takes time. Sign up for a perennial plant workshop, join a local gardening club, listen to relevant gardening podcasts. At Wild Ones, an organization that helps turn your yard into native habitat, you can find local gardeners and tune into educational webinars.

Finally, pay attention to what’s working in your garden and what isn’t—like spraying water on perennial plants that are happier without much. “People need to engage with plants directly,” says Owen. “That is the only way to get real experience and learn the language of gardening.”

For this garden, one of his favorites, Owen was asked to create a lush and colorful space that also attracts wildlife. He planted a variety of pollinator-friendly perennials, grouping them tightly so the garden fills in quickly and weeds struggle to break through. “Beauty is one of the most convincing ways to connect people to nature,” he says. “This garden is a show—it’s riveting, you can’t look away.” The homeowners used to travel a lot. Now they’d rather stay home. Featured plants: lotus (Nelumbo nucifera), butterfly weed (Asclepias tuberosa), blue lobelia (Lobelia siphilitica), leopard plant (Ligularia ‘The Rocket’)