Sitting with The Season

This is me suggesting you sit and stay a while in your own backyard

There is this specific moment in mid to late spring when the day warms and gives us a taste of summer. However, it is more than summer because it is tender and green and lush, so that once the solstice passes, the plants slowly lose their vibrancy. Right now, the wild spaces smell of newness and leaves. A thing you nearly forget the smell of in winter, but it is so overwhelming you only desire to sit outside and smell it, or dig your hands in the soil because you want it to smother your skin. Come July, when the heat rises properly again, the land won’t feel this lush. The fading will already begin as we pull the garlic and all of a sudden realize summer is half spent.

So I linger with the final cup of tea made from last summer’s herbs from the garden. I watch my children frolic in the lawn and breathe in the scent of spring in the heat. The scent that is so beautifully life-giving I will spend an entire lifetime just trying to describe it in words that I don’t believe exist in the English language.

It is a moment you know as someone who resides on open land that there is no turning back and the time demanding of our presence is here and god damn we have earned it.

Just as another spring is beginning to shift into summer, I am once again aware of the growth and changes in my life. Whenever a season begins to shift, I feel this. The sense of not turning back and how the winds are changing both in the land and in myself. How my children are shifting as quickly as the temps do, and how I simply long to make it all last, just as I feel the same about this season.

A practice I make is having a place I can sit or a path I can wander at least once a week, if not multiple times of day. I sit in the same spot. I watch every single thing so closely. I watch the bugs that come to me. I watch the plants rise and slowly bloom and then finally fade as the next ones come to replace them. I watch the birds. I record the sounds of the birds on my favorite birding app. I learn names. I fall in love with the way the winds shift. I sit and learn to not only pay attention, but also read the language of this land.

I thought at some point I would become bored with it. Instead, I only continue to discover new layers and tidbits from the week before. I learn a new smell. I find new layers and conversations unfolding, and it continually teaches me just how much more there is to learn about nature than I ever believed. I keep a note of these details, and I feel I am recording some scout log when I type the words “May 15th, 2025, at 7:14 AM, spotted the first hummingbird”. I note when I find the first milkweed and just how quickly they rise. Every single thing is information I am ingesting, and I am thankful to have made this space to do this in my life.

It is easy, I have learned to sit in your home where it might be cool or head to meet a friend for drinks at a local patio bar in the evening. Yet, I have come to learn these things draw me away from what beauty is unfolding in the world already right off my porch. Now granted, I live on 15 acres in one of the most picturesque places in the Midwest, but I also have lived in places that aren’t this and know you can discover these conversations almost anywhere. Instead, I find myself suggesting a drink on the back deck with my friend while the sun sets, and we can discuss life while being immersed in what is unfolding in this season in nature as well. Little shifts in routine have offered me time and connection with nature in ways that don’t involve me constantly working in nature, but instead, just being with it.

This season passes quickly. At some point, we will look up and the sun will clearly be shifting itself due west again, and our days will shorten. The moon will draw the leaves back into the soil, and we will long for this very rising of energy we feel now from the land around us. If there is a time to pay attention, it is now. I beg of you to sit for a few minutes as many times a day as you can and put away your phone, and just watch. Keep a journal of what you observe if it helps you stay put. Just watch. I promise that at first what feels hard will soften into a new love and longing for something that has always been right in front of you. Maybe in turn, you may begin to find the same in yourself, too.

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Every season, I make a new playlist, and with the beginning of spring comes a playlist as well. I love taking time to make these lists and pull together new sounds for your season, and selfishly, I love it for myself, too. I hope it brings a good background sound to your season ahead.

You can find it on Spotify.

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A snippet from one of my recent designs

5 Plants I ALWAYS Place in Every Design

One of the reasons I hand-drew every single one of my landscape designs is that the plants I love aren’t just sitting in a landscape design program. Much of how I design is based on my work and experience growing food and seeing our landscapes as more than ornamental, but a real ecosystem working with us in harmony.

This means there are a slew of plants I ALWAYS have in a design, but I wouldn’t say other landscape designers choose. Now, I am also a designer who loves to break rules, and I never will add in plants like hostas, hydrangeas, and boxwoods, for instance. Since many times these aren’t contributors to the ecosystem, they stay off my list despite deciding to leave them if they already exist on a property.

So I thought I would share a few plants I LOVE, but you may not necessarily consider for your own landscape if I hadn’t mentioned them.

1. Anise Hyssop Blue Fortune:
   This plant is gorgeous, first of all, and secondly, the bees and butterflies adore it. It blooms consistently, has wonderful foliage, smells incredible even in the winter, and is a natural bird feeder all winter. It makes wonderful tea, and the spike form of the blooms can be cut and dried for arrangements that never fade. I probably insert more than 250 of these plants a year at various sites. They also readily self-seed seed so once you have 1, you will have many. It complements other native plants as well,l such as Blazing Star, for instance.

2. Common Fennel and Bronze Fennel:
   I have never had success growing bulbed fennel, but let me tell you about my 8-foot-tall fennel plants that bring in tons of ladybugs and butterflies all growing season! Not only can you still enjoy the fennel (fronds are up right now and we are using them for tea and dishes already), but in the fall when it goes to seed, save some or gather some fennel pollen to go on your melon slices in August and September. This plant makes quite the show you don’t want to overlook. Common gets tall, but the bronze variety remains shorter at about 4 feet tall.

3. Marshmallow:
   I don’t mean the thing you roast over the fire, I mean the medicinal herb that helps the mucus in your body function even better. It makes one of the most gorgeous blossoms, is sturdy, and adds unique texture to the landscape. Though the leaves can be used, the roots are what they are most known for.

4. Lemon Balm:
   Oh, how the ways I love this perennial herb that grows well, is a great ground cover and low-growing plant in your garden beds to fill gaps, plus it smells absolutely nutty of lemon early in spring. It makes amazing tea and is prolific. When it does go to flower, it is beautiful and simple. I couldn’t design without it.

5. Chives:
   I know you can use other Alliums, and I do because there are many and there are different timings, which I love, but this one gives something edible all year even after the blooms have faded. They are a popular plant amongst the pollinators. Plus, you can divide them every 2-3 years and have even more of them. They also grow well in a lot of different conditions.

I hope that is inspiring to help offset some of the typical thinking in the landscape. All of these are herbs and flowering sort of plants that offer food to you and the ecosystem, while being absolutely beautiful. In my belief, all good landscape designs offer more than just beauty and curb appeal, but a whole list of other offerings for all who are in proximity to it.

You can learn more about design work at Perma Studio, my landscape design studio in Leelanau County, Michigan.

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On my mind this week

Just some things happening and that I am thinking of lately:

• The Art of Frugal Hedonism:
  I recently began this on audiobook, as ever since I began really digging into permaculture, I have been exploring the concept that everything we need already exists. This book was recommended in a course this last year by another student, and I have been really enjoying it thus far. The audiobook is great because the reader is Australian, and there are some good, humorous moments in the book. I am really excited to begin using some of these tips in day-to-day life.

• Roasting All the Veggies:
  Not sure why this is a thing right now, but I have had a renewed love and passion for roasting root veggies this time of year. I am not home as much this time of year, so I like to batch cook things we can just mix into bowl-type meals with veggies, a grain, beans, and another protein of some kind. It makes it easy to have healthy and delicious meals with less prep every night. I love roasting them with cumin or zaatar the most.

• Herbal Tea:
  I have been enjoying whatever fresh herbs are thriving right now and making tea in the afternoons with them. If you grow perennial herbs, there is always something absolutely delicious to pick for tea this time of year. My favorites are Lemon Balm, Mint, early raspberry leaves, or fennel.

• Birkenstock Sandals:
  I just pulled my class leather Birks back out for the summer, and gosh, I nearly forgot how amazing they are. I absolutely live in them. The other shoe I love is my Z-strap Chacos as well. Both are quality and last forever, I swear!

• England:
  I leave tomorrow for England for 10 days. I will be at the Chelsea Flower Show and enjoying a bit of time on my own as a celebration for completing my Permaculture Design Certificate from Cornell. I am going with just my mom, and it will be such a lovely time there! I haven’t been away from the kids this long, so it is a big deal, but I think it is a necessary thing. I will try to get an email out next week, but I most likely will miss Friday. But hoping to start my garden series back up next week now that I am done with school :)

• Solo-trips:
  That said, I have been thinking a lot about life and how our own family is at a place where our parents are healthy and able to go on trips, but it is hard for us to travel as a whole family with our kids. We have done it and I am glad we have, but it is tiring. So we are deciding to take a bit more solo travel in the coming years till our kids are a bit older. This many times is also more affordable. Sometimes you have to embrace the season you are in when you are a parent.

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The spring guide is here! It is for our paid subscribers so if you aren’t one yet, you can get a discount below to join and get access to a new guide every season. I have big updates coming to the summer one so sign up now.