THE MORE THAT I SEE photographs of gravel gardens and the more that I learn about this gardening style, which besides its distinctive aesthetic appeal promises to be water-wise and weed-suppressing, the more I want to give it a try. So I was happy to get an early copy of “The Gravel Garden,” a book that’s due out in June, and be treated to virtual walks through 20 such landscapes in a range of sizes and styles.

The book’s co-author, Jeff Epping, who has been making gravel gardens for clients since 2008 and converted his own Wisconsin front yard from lawn to gravel in 2017 is here to talk about what kinds of plants work in these resilient gardens and provide us with some design inspiration, too.

Jeff is a longtime horticulturist and garden designer who for 28 years was director of horticulture at Olbrich Botanical Gardens in Madison, Wisc. Jeff’s upcoming book is called “The Gravel Garden: Visionary Drought-Defying Naturalistic Designs” (affiliate link), written in collaboration with Teresa Woodard. It takes us around the country and to the UK and Germany, too, to look at how various garden makers have interpreted the technique of gravel gardening, and I’m so glad to welcome him back to the program.

Plus: Comment in the box near the bottom of the page for a chance to win a copy of “The Gravel Garden.”

Read along as you listen to the May 18, 2026 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on Apple Podcasts (iTunes) or Spotify (and browse my archive of podcasts here).

gravel-gardening possibilities, with jeff epping

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Margaret Roach: Welcome back; nice to have you all the way from Wisconsin [laughter].

Jeff Epping: All the way from Wisconsin, where one day it’s 90 and the next day it’s frost warnings.

Margaret: Oh, you must live here [laughter].

Jeff: Yeah. Right.

Margaret: Oh my goodness. Well, congratulations on the book. I’ve been enjoying it because as I said in the introduction, it’s been kind of making me think, “Huh, maybe I could do that over here or over here,” because not all gravel gardens are created equal. There’s a lot of possibilities. And we all hear lately about lawn alternatives and, “Oh, put a meadow in your front yard” and so forth, but you put a gravel garden in yours [laughter] [photo below]. So it can be an ecological solution, too, even a lawn alternative, yes?

Jeff: Yeah, absolutely. I always say that a lawn space is probably the best place for a gravel garden because they do well in full sun where the best lawns do as well. And we have so much lawn that there’s always an opportunity for a gravel garden. And yeah, it can start out as small as you want. I mean, 3 by 3 or really, really big, like a 3-acre gravel garden that we cover in the book at Epic Systems.

So the beauty of them is that they are so climate resilient and in this day and age of this crazy climate change and water being so precious and all of us needing to think about how we utilize that, now is the time I think for us to think about all different types of drought-tolerant gardens.

And I do design meadows as you mentioned, but I have never worked with, designed, maintained a garden that’s been easier to maintain and more in tune with mother nature and what mother nature provides than gravel gardens. And that’s really has something I just started out thinking, “Oh, this is kind of cool,” to like, “Wow, this is really something that we should be promoting.” So-

Margaret: So here we are. [Laughter.]

Jeff: Right. I wrote a book, which I never thought I’d do.

Margaret: And in the new book you say, “Basically gravel gardening is a technique in which deep-rooted drought tolerant perennials are planted in about a 6-inch layer of gravel that suppresses weeds and conserves water.”

So that’s the simplest description. About four years ago when you and I collaborated on a “New York Times” garden column, and we also did a podcast together, we talked about the how-to of making a gravel garden, where people can get some of the how-to inspiration. But I wanted to talk today about what you were just hinting at. There’s such a diversity of possibilities both in scale and in style. And it’s not just that sort of … I don’t know, I think at first I thought, “Oh, you must mean a garden of alpine plants” or something when you say gravel garden, but that’s not it.

Jeff: I think that’s what people think of is a rock garden, an alpine garden, but it’s not really that at all.

Margaret: And to show us that it’s not, you take us to these 20 gardens in the U.S. and elsewhere, and we could even start just with a small trough, couldn’t we, a trough garden? I think there are trough gardens in the book.

Jeff: Yes, absolutely, as small as a trough. So if you’re in an apartment or a condo or something and you just want to give the concept a try, you could do something like that. Or we even converted a somewhat derelict, very leaky, three-tiered fountain that the City of Madison water utility was looking to hopefully do something with. Otherwise, they were going to jackhammer it out, which is a lot of work and a lot of energy. And so they called me and we created this magnificent, I think, gravel garden. It’s in the book; you could be the judge. But it’s only 18 inches deep. And when you put 5 inches of gravel, that doesn’t give you a lot of soil. But I’ll be honest with you, it’s one of the finest gravel gardens I’ve worked with personally. And of course in the book, like you say, we feature 20 and it’s really cool to see what everybody’s doing.

And we don’t all do it exactly the same way either, but the basic components are there, the gravel being typically several inches, if not even almost a foot deep like Sean Conway’s garden in Rhode Island. So yeah, it’s really a lot of fun. And like I say, once you get them established—it’s work upfront, don’t get me wrong, because you have to do a few different things and have that gravel brought in and create that—but once you do that, then you’re on cruise control for the future [laughter].

Margaret: Right. So you just mentioned Sean Conway in Rhode Island. And so there’s that stereotype gravel garden, we think it’s synonymous maybe with alpine-ish looking or rock garden looking, but then there’s someone like Sean Conway in Rhode Island in the book, and he incorporates formerly clipped hornbeam. I don’t know, they’re almost like topiaries [above]. They’re like these clipped, barrel-shaped topiarish sort of things on top of the trunk, up on the trunk—elevated, sort of floating—and clipped purple beech hedge. And so it’s not just that other stereotype. So I thought maybe we could just talk about some of the extremes and examples. I mean, some are very romantic looking, not stark at all, not harsh at all.

Jeff: That’s right. Yeah. And Sean’s garden prior was a vegetable garden, and it was actually a set for the gardening show that he used to have. And when the show ran its course and they were done, he said, “I just can’t maintain this giant vegetable garden anymore.” And he was inspired by the work of Lisa Roper at Chanticleer, who we featured in the book as well.

Margaret: Wonderful, wonderful gravel garden [a section of it is pictured at the top of the page].

Jeff: Oh, it’s amazing, right? And he said, “I’m going to try this. ” So he just tried a little corner, and was so amazed at the results that he took it to another level. And he has these beautiful clipped beech hedge and like you mentioned, the hornbeams, yeah, and very, very clean edging and such. So a lot of times people have, and you know this, but have a little bit of a hard time accepting these naturalistic-style gardens. And so these cues for care, as they say, help people accept the wildness to the garden. And that is repeated in most of the gardens that we photograph for the book, which is pretty neat.

Margaret: So to have some element that says “this is a garden, someone is maintaining this, someone has put their touches on it,” so to speak, something like his clipped hedges and his sort of topiary-ish hornbeams and so forth that alert you to it’s not just a wild space.

Jeff: Exactly, exactly. And Kelly Norris created a beautiful garden in Ames, Iowa, for Ana McCracken. And Ana wanted sort of an ode to the prairie, so Kelly being the incredible designer that he is, created such a garden. Mostly native perennial plants and very, very wild in nature. But again, he used ‘Taylor’ junipers, our native Juniperus virginiana. And ‘Taylor,’ though, is very formal looking: central leader, very upright. It looks like it’s clipped, but it really isn’t. And he used those along with some artwork in the garden and such and pulled it off beautifully. It’s such a gorgeous garden.

And Joan Nassauer is the professor of landscape architecture at the University of Michigan who coined this term, cues for care, or messy ecosystems orderly frame. So like you say, a hedge around something or even a nicely edged lawn around a more wild landscape really helps people.

Margaret: It really does. And it can be as simple as a very large vessel or something, like a very, very, very large almost sculptural pot or something on axis somewhere that draws your eye. I mean, it sort of changes the whole thing from a wild space to, oh, someone’s been here and thought this through. [Above, part of Andrew Bunting’s Pennsylvania gravel garden.] 

Jeff: Exactly, exactly. And oftentimes they have sculpture in the garden at Reiman Gardens in Ames as well that we feature, they have some really nice sculptures in there. Yeah, it varies, but it shows that somebody is paying attention. Somebody’s caring for that garden.

Margaret: At Olbrich where you worked for many years, the botanical gardens, there are four gravel gardens, I think. And one is like a 5,000-square-foot entry garden and one is like, at first when I looked at the picture in the book, it’s like a long border, along a path, and the path isn’t even I think gravel, maybe like a mulch-y kind of path or a dirt path, but a long, long, long border. It almost looks like the scale of a border where you do the old-style sort of bedding-out, and I think it used to maybe have annuals in it or something each year and be changed over as a display element. And now it’s this long, long, long perennial border, but it’s a gravel garden.

Jeff: Yeah. And it’s front and center. It’s right there along the main road that takes you by the garden. And you’re right, when I first started at Olbrich, it was always annuals. And it was beautiful, but there’s a lot of energy that goes into such a big border like that.

And so we did two things. There was a big lawn panel, a bluegrass turf, and we converted that to a prairie dropseed meadow and mainly green, but then we added more color to it over time. And then we changed that big annual border into a gravel garden and it really has been successful.

And I really wanted to have it front and center so that people could see that there’s other possibilities as they were driving by other than lawn, lawn and more lawn, right?

And then we took it to the next level with the entrance garden that’s right there at the main entrance to Olbrich. And that again was a very ’70s landscape with daylilies and pachysandra and all sorts of the common things. And we blew it up and put in a big, big old gravel garden and showed that this is what we’re trying to do at Olbrich, trying to be more environmentally friendly. And so it’s a great entrance to the rest of the garden.

Margaret: So a couple of times you’ve mentioned prairie plants, a palette of plants being prairie-oriented or whatever and grasses and forbs, flowering perennials, and so forth [like on the book cover, above]. And so again, it’s not just all “rock garden plants” [laughter]. There’s a wide range of plants represented in the gardens in this book, but prairie plants do well and I guess that’s because they are drought-tolerant. And that little definition that I read from the book earlier on that one of the sort of characterizations is that it’s “in which deep-rooted, drought-tolerant perennials are planted.” We’re looking for things that are tolerant of drought and root themselves in deeply, yes?

Jeff: Yeah, because again, we have that thick layer of gravel. I experimented with all sorts of different plants when I first started doing this. And though there are a lot of drought-tolerant perennials, they don’t necessarily have deep root systems. So like many of the alpine plants, they have wide-spreading root systems, or they’re just good at rooting in and maintaining with a shallow root system. And so I tried things like creeping sedums, which you think, “Oh, sedums, they’re the most drought tolerant of any perennial.” And all the creeping types faded away within three years, because they couldn’t get roots down deep enough.

So we’re looking at plants that have a deeper root system. And yes, the prairie plants are the stars, and there’s many, many of those that work perfectly, though there’s wet prairies too, so those species don’t. But things like calamint, the non-seeding calamint, Calamintha nepeta subsp. nepeta or the cultivar  called ‘Montrose White,’ super drought-tolerant and just a great perennial for the gravel garden.

Whereas, Margaret, I always think of Nepeta or catmint as being super-drought tolerant, right? And so it is, but not in a gravel garden. It doesn’t root deep enough. And so I learned soon after planting many of them [laughter] that they just didn’t last. So I’ve made a lot of mistakes along the way, but I’ve also figured out what works and what doesn’t.

And the beauty with the book was we saw plants out of our zone because we traveled to the East Coast, we even went down to Texas to see the work of Jared Barnes, Dr. Jared. And so those plants worked extremely well, but not hardy enough for us in Wisconsin. So yeah, it was fun to see. And the palette is pretty vast actually of what you might be able to use for sure.

Margaret: There were bulbs in a number of pictures in the book, and so they can root in deep enough? I mean, they’re planted under the gravel; the bulb itself is placed lower in. And so then the roots can get down to the subsoil or whatever we call it beneath the gravel, I guess, because bulbs seem to show up in a number of places.

Jeff: So in each of the chapters, we feature something unique about that garden. And the garden we talked mostly about bulbs was Chanticleer, because Lisa Roper has been doing fantastic work with bulbs [above; photo by Lisa Roper]. And many of the bulbs that we use in our gardens are actually native to rocky, mountainous areas like Turkey and such. And when we put them in our rich organic-y soils, a lot of them don’t last, because it’s too moist when they’re dormant and they get botrytis and other diseases that they rot off.

But in the gravel garden, we’re not watering to any degree after it’s established, or at all. And the bulbs love it, because they’re just sitting there baking in that soil below. I shouldn’t say baking, they’re not hot, but they’re dry, and that’s what they like. And they come back year after year. A lot of the species tulips are just absolutely gorgeous, but daffodils work and all the bulbs that we’ve tried and I’ve seen in the gardens that not only we photographed, but I’ve seen… Because we photographed during the growing season mainly, so Lisa was kind enough to share photographs. She’s an excellent photographer of her garden in the spring.

Margaret: She has alliums, I think, in some spots and lots of other things.

Jeff: Yeah. Allium, Chionodoxa work well, like I say, all the different daffodils. Tulips for me at home, not so good, not because they’re not well-adapted; it’s because the rabbits love them [laughter].

Margaret: Oh, the bane of my existence.

Jeff: You, me and a number of other gardeners. But anyway, they’re amazing. And also, you mentioned alliums, and of course there’s the perennial alliums like ‘Summer Beauty’ and ‘Millennium’ and that group, which do great in gravel gardens. But there’s also the big ball-shaped alliums that come up and then go dormant like ‘Purple sensation.’ And Adam Glas at Swarthmore College has a fantastic display of ‘Purple Sensation’ alliums in their roundabout [above; photo by Lisa Roper], which is a fun application for a gravel garden.

Margaret: Yeah, no, so that was interesting because again, it’s not just the plants you might think it’s a wider palette. So what about some of the … I think of herbs as liking good drainage, so to speak, but maybe their roots aren’t going to go deep enough, so probably they wouldn’t be-

Jeff: A lot of them wouldn’t be. Like lavender does well.

Margaret: Oh, O.K.

Jeff: Yeah. Now for us, it’s a ltitle touchy because we’re a little farther north, but there’s a lot of new cultivars out there now that we’re experimenting with. But again, they like it dry and so they do well. I’m sure if I was warm enough, rosemary would do quite well. Here, I can use the ornamental oregano like ‘Herrenhausen,’ or I think it translates to manor house, Origanum is a great gravel garden plant. And so yeah, there’s quite a number of Mediterranean herbs that can do quite well. It’s again, it’s more about the hardiness, I think.

Margaret: O.K. I remember there’s a story in the book about one gardener in Pennsylvania, at Meadowbrook Farm in Pennsylvania. I think his name is Glenn Ashton, the head gardener there. And he had to relocate some prickly pear cactus when a deer fence was going to be installed. But instead of just sort of saying, “Oh, I got to get these out of here and move them for the construction and I’m going to put them over here,” it was like the impetus for making a gravel garden, and they became a feature. So that’s another plant. So depending on where one lives, but that’s another plant, group of plants, right?

Jeff: Oh, for sure. Yeah. And Glenn, he is just a hoot. I mean, he’s the funniest guy, most passionate gardener. And yeah, he piled up all sorts of gravel to create good drainage. And he’s actually growing chollas, which I’ve only seen grown down in the southwestern part of the United States [laughter] and Glenn’s growing them in Pennsylvania.

Margaret: Yeah, he’s making these micro, I don’t know what you would call it, these little habitats, these microcosmic habitats [laughter] because of these piles of gravel. Yeah, no, it’s great.

Jeff: Yeah. And agaves, things that I can’t grow here for the life of me, but it’s so fun to see. And of course they’re super well-adapted, and they don’t have to water them. In fact, he’s making the drainage 10 times better so that he can keep them alive so they’re not too wet. Pretty neat.

Margaret: There’s one little tip, I think it was in sort of an FAQ, a frequently asked question section of the book, and it was talking about if you wanted some annuals for sort of extra oomph during the growing season, you could make these little pockets by embedding in the gravel, embedding pieces like 6- or 8-inch pieces of pipe, of clay or metal pipe, down into the gravel, and fill those with soil. So in other words, you’re not creating a big soil area, you’re just planting into these little pipes [laughter]. And I just sort of loved the idea; it’s almost like plugs.

Jeff: And that crazy gardener would be me because I wanted to add more color to my gravel garden. But what planting annuals and that gravel every year was just a kind of a pain. I had some old clay pipe that I just use for crazy pots anyway. And so yeah, they were about 8 inches deep and so I just sort of embedded them in the soil a little bit. The gravel comes up to the top edge, but yet soil is available to them in the top end. So I can plant really drought tolerant things that them like cleome, cosmos do great.

Margaret: I could maybe do zinnias or something.

Jeff: Yeah. In fact, I’m growing zinnias this year; I always do them under lights, this, that, and the other. And then poppies seed in there. And now I’ve found because my gravel garden is right on the street and all the deicing snow has sand mixed in with it, that 2 feet along the curb is getting infiltrated with some sand. And so it’s kind of fun. I’ve been throwing California poppy seeds in there, some Verbena bonariensis, Corydalis lutea, which is a nice self-seeding one.

Margaret: Oh, that’s fun.

Jeff: And they’re all just kind of seeding in there. Now every once in a while I get a dandelion in there too, but in the rest of the garden, no, I don’t get any of the self-seeding. So I just kind of rolled with it rather than try to fight that sand, which would be impossible. So it’s kind of a fun opportunity then to grow drought-tolerant annuals, which I typically wouldn’t be able to.

And a garden like Chanticleer and Lisa’s method is actually mixing sand and some soil in with her gravel. She wants it to self-seed and be an artist and just kind of pick and choose what she wants. But I like the less maintenance [laughter].

Margaret: Right, because as any of us know who have gravel in an area of our property, a shallow gravel with soil just underneath it, it’s the favorite place for everything to self sow.

Jeff: Exactly.

Margaret: Well, the new book is “The Gravel Garden: Visionary Drought-Defying Naturalistic Designs.” And Jeff, it’s really great that you did this, because we needed to see the diversity of possibilities I think in one place. I think it’s really time, because it’s a subject that’s been coming up, and yet I’d see a little of it here and a little of it there. So this is great. I thank you. And it’s good to talk to you again. I hope I’ll talk to you soon again.

(Photos by B0b Stefko except as noted.)

enter to win a copy of ‘the gravel garden’

I’LL BUY A COPY of “<https://amzn.to/4tynA7K”>“The Gravel Garden: Visionary Drought-Defying Naturalistic Designs,”” by Jeff Epping and Teresa Woodard for one lucky reader. All you have to do to enter is answer this question in the comments box below:

Have you experimented with gravel gardening yet—even if only in a trough planting? Are you curious?

No answer, or feeling shy? Just say something like “count me in” and I will, but a reply is even better. I’ll pick a random winner after entries close at midnight Tuesday, May 26, 2026. Good luck to all.

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MY WEEKLY public-radio show, rated a “top-5 garden podcast” by “The Guardian” newspaper in the UK, began its 17th year in March 2026. It’s produced at Robin Hood Radio, the smallest NPR station in the nation. Listen locally in the Hudson Valley (NY)-Berkshires (MA)-Litchfield Hills (CT) Mondays at 8:30 AM Eastern, rerun at 8:30 Saturdays. Or play the May 18, 2026 show using the player near the top of this transcript. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes/Apple Podcasts or Spotify (and browse my archive of podcasts here).