A Way to Garden with Margaret Roach - November 8, 2021 - David Culp on Design Tweaks

Designer David Culp sees the garden in layers, but not just the most obvious landscape ones most of us do—meaning the canopy, the shrub layer and ground-covering plants. His view of the garden is more like 3D chess and then some: layers of color, texture, shape, and even the layer of time. He’s here to offer us advice for looking at our garden’s many aspects with an eye to strengthening the overall impact. 

David has been making his own 2-acre garden in Pennsylvania for about 30 growing seasons, yet he still looks to tweak it regularly, to continue to fine-tune. David, a longtime teacher at Longwood Gardens, is lately teaching online in popular monthly webinars, hosted by Jim Peterson, the publisher of “Garden Design,” with their next one coming up November 11th. 

He’s the author of “The Layered Garden: Design Lessons for Year-Round Beauty from Brandywine Cottage,” and a follow-up book last year, “A Year at Brandywine Cottage: Six Seasons Of Beauty, Bounty and Blooms.”