The yard of Kevan Klosterwill who grew up in Athens, Georgia, and earned bachelors and master degrees in Landscape Architecture there. He then went on to the University of Virginia for his PhD in the Constructed Environment.
By Kate Klimesh,
Be prepared for a complete paradigm shift in thinking about gardening and landscaping. While many consider visual accents in key areas of a person’s grounds the norm – flowers bordering the house, a tree in the yard, bushes along the property edge – Kevan Klosterwill, a Decorah-based landscape designer and historian, sees things quite differently, and invites others to take a deeper look at their home gardens.
“Our yards are the primary —and often the only — way we engage with the nonhuman world. How we choose to manage them impacts who we are and how we understand our place in the world,” says Klosterwill, who is currently in progress renovating his family’s own outdoor space utilizing several various “garden” types and landscaping features. “Do we run loud machines and spray chemicals that poison plants, insects and humans to maintain a monocultural lawn that’s little used? Or are we tending, weeding and nurturing our landscapes, moving our bodies and learning to observe plants and animals in the process?”
Klosterwill grew up in Athens, Georgia, and earned bachelors and master degrees in Landscape Architecture there. He then went on to the University of Virginia for his PhD in the Constructed Environment. His dissertation focused on regenerative agriculture, permaculture and other carbon-positive landscape and gardening strategies as community-driven strategies to address climate change. He and his family relocated to Decorah, his wife Zoë’s hometown, following their birth of their son Alden.
“We bought our home on Franklin Street in Decorah in 2020,” Klosterwill explains. “When we first moved in, there was gravel from sidewalk to the back fence, and only a handful of scattered shrubs. We moved out 50 to 60 wheelbarrows full of gravel and began renovation on our small 6,000 sq. ft. lot to create a distinct sequence of outdoor rooms that included all the things we liked to do outside.”
And with a young son, he and his wife Zoe were definitely looking to maximize their space.
Some of the considerations he took into account included the overall climate of Decorah, the local microclimate of his home — which is shaped by the uplands of nearby Phelps Park, which softens harsh winds — and adjacent houses, which shape breezes and shade, as well as the local ecology. He also thought carefully about how best to utilize native plants, and responsibly introduce exotics which wouldn’t escape to cause problems elsewhere. The garden is also a trial space for Klosterwill, who is testing marginally hardy Southern transplants in this sheltered spot, including oakleaf hydrangea and umbrella magnolia, native to the Appalachians.
The entrance to the outdoor space is through a wooden gate, and they have thoughtfully planted shrubs and flowers along the entrance to shield visitors from seeing all the way through to the backyard and create a sense of arrival. When fully grown, two witchhazels and an ironwood tree will shelter this front walk. Shrubs not only provide privacy for the family, but encourage a pause to experience this as a separate and distinct space within the yard, with its own purpose and beauty to enjoy. Next, the path leads through a sunny spot that hosts a miniature prairie featuring milkweeds and coneflowers, with more exciting accents like seven-foot tall delphiniums thrown in to mask a blank wall.
Working with some features that were already in place, he planned and planted a shade garden along the side patio with a central focus of an existing old lilac. Bloodroot and bluebells are blooming among rhododendrons. “And the trilliums we planted years ago and forgot about have finally decided to come up this year,” Klosterwill pointed out.
The limestone-edged gardens wind to the backyard where Klosterwill has all the turf, except for a small elliptical lawn for sitting and playing, surrounded by a perennial border, inspired by traditional English cottage garden design. Klosterwill has designed the beds to ensure flowering all season long, from the first spring crocuses through summer’s lupines, blazing stars and daisies, to the last asters of autumn. He seeded the space with California poppies, an annual, to ensure a vigorous cover of flowers in the space’s early years, until the perennials have a chance to catch up. “We’d rather our spend our time taking care of the flowers than mowing a big empty yard,” Klosterwill says. More flowers also means more native pollinators, who are attracted to the diversity of flowers, including volunteers like butterfly milkweed that have been welcomed in the borders.
The rear of the yard is designed to one day serve as a permaculture-inspired food forest. “Trying to maximize the amount of food we can produce, we utilize ground cover plants like strawberries to keep weeds down, and interspersed raspberry, serviceberry and currants as understory plants. We’ve added in apple, peach, plum and pawpaw trees that will become the canopy. This has a plant in every spot possible to produce a good amount of food in a small space, as long as the birds and bunnies don’t get to it first.”
Klosterwill’s design packs a lot into a small space, but it is a wonderful extension of their house, even on a tiny lot. “Think about your yard as composed outdoor rooms – what would I do with an added 4,000 sq. ft of livable space? – and plan for density of features within that. Then it becomes easier to visualize and tackle in phases. The average cost of renovating outdoor space is around $5-$10 per square foot, versus $150-$200/sq.ft for a home or interior space, so it’s a very economical way to expand your living space.”
When Klosterwill works with residential clients, he begins by asking them to reflect on their relationship to their landscape: “How do you use it, or not? What do you like to do or not like to do?” Often, these are surprisingly hard questions to answer. To truly understand the best garden for any yard, its owners must take stock of their senses and notice what they truly experience – what are the sights, the smells, sounds; truly look at the buildings, furniture, fixtures they currently have. What do they make them feel?
“We’re trying to create a space where you’d like to be to feel really alive. The truth is, we haven’t made a beautiful world. We push through the gas stations and strip malls and parking lots and distract ourselves from the fact that these are incredibly inhumane places. Our homes can be a place to learn how to reconnect to the nonhuman world, to figure out what makes us feel good, and what’s necessary to nurture those qualities in our broader community,” says Klosterwill.
When designing, Klosterwill is often thinking about the environmental consequences of the plants and maintenance strategies his design require. Sometimes that means designing for increased pollinators locally, but it can also be something that has global consequences, however small, by sequestering carbon through tree planting or careful management of soil. “If you are actually out there to notice more butterflies and fireflies hang out in a yard with more native flowers, for instance and you value a world that has those sorts of creatures living in it, you might be more inclined to support those practices elsewhere,” he explains. “And if you’re trying to sequester carbon in your garden, you might be more likely to think about how other activities in your community impact the overall climate impact of the community’s built environment.”
In addition to his landscape design work, Klosterwill consults for several firms around the country on historically and culturally significant landscapes, and park master planning. He is also working on a biography of landscape Warren H. Manning, a protégé of Frederick Law Olmsted. Titled “Our Whole Country a Park:” Community Days and Civic Horticulture in Warren H. Manning’s Modern Practice, the book will be published by the Library of American Landscape History. Manning worked extensively on park system plans in the Midwest throughout the 1890s through the 1900s, including Menomonie, Wis., where he began developing a participatory approach to community planning decades before other planners started working that way. “Manning saw the design and management of garden and parks systems as a means to community participation, providing a space for people to engage the natural world as well as with each other and create a stronger democracy in the process.”
Klosterwill’s work as a historian informs his approach to design. Studying the past, and the philosophy behind the famous landscapes and gardening traditions we know today can provide inspiration, both for home gardens and public spaces. “Just like the word ‘township’ refers to both a place and the people that inhabit it, land-scape has similar linguistic roots, and was historically a word that referred to a community as well as the physical fields and forests they tended,” Klosterwill explains. “The historic New England town commons is one remnant of this old idea. Similarly, Thomas Jefferson proposed dividing up the Midwest into its familiar grid of farmsteads because he thought caring for the land would create a strong democracy. In towns across the country in the late 1800s, citywide improvement campaigns linked beautification of individual yards with broader community benefit. And Driftless-native architect Frank Lloyd Wright updated Jefferson’s democratic vision for the suburban one-acre lot. “In this time of so much cultural division, I’m very interested in how gardening can be a way to bring people back together, drawing on these old American traditions.”
Our home landscapes can be a place to practice those ideas, and build a common vocabulary based on observation and experimentation. “When it comes to home improvement, I’m a sloppy carpenter, but the garden is very forgiving — my son and I are playing in the dirt together. If a plant gets droopy or dies, I dig it up and try again somewhere else or with some other species” says Klosterwill. “And I can compare notes or share divisions with my neighbors and community and meet new people.”
But the garden can also provide opportunities for deeper reflection.
“People tend to focus on resist, resist, resist (spray for weeds, and compartmentalizing plants that frame the front of the house behind a plastic edging – basically trying to make natural elements fit an unnatural environment), that’s just not the planet we live on, it’s not perfectly still. The world is ephemeral and dynamic and transient. If more of us internalized that lesson through experience of a landscape over time, I think it would make for a much more interesting world,” Klosterwill says.
For home gardeners looking to learn more about basic landscape design strategies, Klosterwill suggests looking back to garden manuals from the early 1900s. He notes they have all the theory in an easy-to-read format for those willing to learn. “These books are very accessible, with diagrams and ideas that are often more digestible and timeless than newer, trendier texts.” Klosterwill noted specifically “The Manual of Gardening,” by Liberty Hyde Bailey published in 1910, but there are many available in the public domain.
Or, you could just hire him to design your yard for you. Just be ready to truly see yourself in your outdoor space, and the relationships it opens up to the world around you. As a start, Klosterwill recommends going outside, slowing down and practicing being a thoughtful observer. Connect with your neighbor, trade notes and when you’re ready, dig in and work to make your corner of the world just a little more beautiful.
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