When you meet landscape architect Thomas Rainer he comes across as a pleasant, mild mannered fellow… not at all the type to be traveling around the world, as he does, spouting revolutionary ideas calculated to upend years and years of conventional gardening wisdom. As he writes in his preface to Planting in a Post-Wild World, the 2015 book he wrote with Claudia West, his ideas come from his time as a boy in suburban Birmingham, Alabama where he spent countless happy hours roaming a stretch of indigenous Piedmont forest near his home. His playground was lost to development when he was in high school. As an adult, he still mourns its loss. But he is also a realist who understands that the worldwide development juggernaut is not to be stopped and that the original spaces which are lost can never truly be put back as they were.

Instead, in his work as a landscape designer, educator, author—and now partner in the new landscape design firm Phyto Studio—Rainer has developed a horticulture philosophy that advocates transforming the green spaces that remain (including such unpromising remnants as hell strips, the edges of parking lots and the tops of buildings) into vigorous, low-maintenance landscapes that mirror the way plants grow together naturally. As a result, Rainer boldly asks us to use methods that fly in the face of how gardeners have worked the land for generations.

Read on for his dos and don’ts for growing an earth-friendly garden that he says produces better results with less work.

Photography courtesy of Phyto Studio.

1. Amending the Soil: Don’t

Above: Photograph by Thomas Rainer.

Conventional site preparation encourages amending the existing soil until it resembles a kind of generic potting mixture: loose, friable, deeply fertile black dirt. However, Rainer says, “Plants don’t want generic soil, they want specific soil.” Far better, he says, to choose plants that will thrive in the soil you have, rather than trying to create an artificial environment for plants that wouldn’t naturally grow where you want to plant them.

2. Double Digging: Don’t