Which was fine with Mr. Beitel. “I’m tired of the manicured look,” he said. “What’s exciting is to get back to basics, to really study a site to get a feel for the light and the environment that was there originally, and to translate that into a design for a nontraditional garden.”

Every garden also tells a story about the person who designed it. Mr. Beitel, 56, grew up in a family of avid gardeners. “My Sicilian grandfather had a huge garden, and it was so beautiful, partly because it was so essential to the family. You could see it in the craftsmanship of how he built a simple fence or a raised box. From him, I learned how to work with the land and take advantage of the conditions you have on site,” he said.

Untamed landscapes like this one also owe a debt to the High Line in New York City. Since 2009, when the Dutch garden designer Piet Oudolf’s painterly drifts of grasses and wildflowers debuted on a stretch of elevated walkway in Manhattan, the park’s design has been influencing garden designers around the country. The High Line in turn pays homage to the 20th-century prairie garden movement, which venerated the unspoiled expanses of the Great Plains and the strong horizontal line of the horizon.