After a long and illustrious career as a garden editor for prominent magazines, Lindsey Taylor took the leap and founded her own garden design company. She is now based at Atlas Studios, a formerly derelict building in Beacon, New York. From her soaring, sun flooded studio Lindsey divulges why she works from her head and not a plan, the one plant she adds to every garden, and the importance of designing a garden in sympathy with its existing flora.

When not overseeing her private clients’ projects, Taylor focuses on her own gardening spaces. Until recently, that’s been her town garden in Beacon, NY, where, she says, she’s been “allowed to plant anything I want — it’s a small, fenced-in yard where anything goes, within reason.” (“I have more there than I should, but since I know what I’m doing, I can keep it under control.”) Soon, though, she’ll be moving to a home in the countryside 10 miles south along the Hudson, in Garrison. “It’s bordered by a state park, on a high elevation with wonderful rock outcroppings,” she says. “There's a lot already there: oaks, hickory, pine, amelanchier, high and low bush blueberry, mountain laurel, little bluestem grass, carex, ferns. The approach I’m taking is to mostly edit, adding only what feels right for the setting while working with the existing soil conditions.” In that spirit, she’ll be careful to work with what she finds on site — like wood chips from fallen trees — rather than introducing new soil or mulch. “I want the house to feel like it belongs, and not an intruder.”

Lindsey hard at work in her cinderblock garden tending to species including Valerian, Russian sage, Mexican feather grass, Guara, Verbascum, and plum poppies.

This perspective, she says, is emblematic of changing ideas about what should be grown where. “I like how more people have become interested in gardening and learning about a wider range of plants — their proper names, and plants that can help and work with our ecosystem rather than against. More people, it seems, have expanded their palettes and are responding to a wilder look, thinking about what they are doing and whether it’s beneficial to the environment, which means creating gardens that aren’t dependent on natural resources and chemicals to survive.”

Designing a garden in sympathy with its existing flora is a valuable lesson for gardeners of all abilities — especially at a cultural moment when anything is possible, for the right price, whether it’s good for the environment or not. “We have a chance to learn more about working with existing conditions — seeing what you can do to give a garden more layers of seasonal interest using native shrubs, trees, and perennials, all while taking a very light touch,” she says. From there, her approach is intuitive. “There's planning and research that goes into all my work, but when it comes to my own gardens, I tend to work from my head, not a plan,” she says. “I’ll make lists of plants I'd like to include — usually in the winter when I have down time — and sketch out some ideas. I'm more like an abstract artist with a blank canvas pushing around the paint until I get to a point where I stand back and can say, ‘I think that's it!’ But unlike with a finished painting, the work with a garden never stops.”