This is the introduction to a multi-part series on how to garden.

I have recently decided to start a garden design business. Academia, after all, don’t pay like it used to. So in addition to my own gardens, I’m now working on several other people’s gardens. I’m an absolute obsessive about gardening. I routinely spend 8 hours a day in the garden (if my children are willing to stay outside that long). One of the things I am most obsessive about, however, is that people don’t have to be obsessive to have a great garden. Most of my friends would love to have a great garden. They just do not have a lot of money or time to devote to creating it. They feel overwhelmed at the task and think it is too much work. I’ve heard, “I always kill plants,” or “I have a brown thumb,” or “I don’t have the energy.” My neighbor once asked me over to give her advice about where to plant a tree. I suggested some spaces and turned to leave. She clutched my arm as I started to leave. She told me she had no idea how to plant a tree and wanted me to walk her through it step by step. I think there are a lot of people like this. Much of the advice on the internet for any given gardening task (starting seeds, digging a bed, designing aesthetically attractive gardens or containers) I’ve read is often, I think, unnecessarily complicated. It involves either too much work or too much expense.

There are many, many reasons to have a garden. Growing your own food is cheaper, more fun, usually tastier, and is as low as you can get on the food miles. Grass lawns consume enormous amounts of fresh water. Water run-off from lawns is both wasteful and harmful to marine life. Planting trees strategically can lower your energy bills (without even getting into green roofs or living walls). For a relatively low outlay, it can increase your home’s value by up to 12.7%. Most important (to me), however, is the psychological and health benefits a garden brings. A good garden should make you want to be outside. It should make your lawn (if you have one) something you actually use. Being outside, or seeing beautiful plants on your stoop when you come home from a hard day, or on the windowsill while you’re working, boosts mood, concentration, and energy. An outdoor space devoted to a seating or eating area just invites leisure. Many years before I became a crazed gardener, I was a surly teenager with pink hair. My parents hire a landscape designer to do their gardens. One garden, in particular, was just so beautiful. Back then, I couldn’t identify a single plant besides impatiens. Didn’t matter. I never got tired of looking at it, it never failed to cheer me up.

Of course, you should hire me and I’ll design you a great garden! However, in the assumption that you’re not in the DC area looking for a professional designer, here’s my plan: I want to create a from-soup-to-nuts gardening guide (and hone my own gardening philosophy in the process) for people who want to start gardening but lack money, time, and energy. My focus will be on being as simple and low-maintenance as possible, and as frugal as possible. Sometimes, the frugal option is not a low-maintenance option or vice-versa. When that is the case I will describe both options and indicate which is which.

So you know where I stand, here are the basic tenets of my gardening philosophy:

1) Pretty much anyone can have a garden of some kind. You have a yard that is a bare patch of weeds that is 4 feet by 3 feet? You can cram some serious beauty into that tiny space. You live in an urban apartment? You can have window boxes filled with herbs or flowers. If your apartment has a roof or patio or balcony, you can have a lovely container garden with ornamentals, edibles, or both (or, my favorite, edibles that are ornamental). A few containers of simple plants on your front steps can cheer you as you enter your home, especially if they are wafting a lovely smell.

2) Many people who want to start a garden, especially if they are ecologically-minded, focus solely on growing edibles. That is fine! That’s great! I think everyone should have the garden she wants to have, full stop! I will, however, be focusing a good amount of attention on ornamentals as well as edibles. Here’s why: first, they look better, of course! Ornamentals can give you that feeling of outdoor joy. Second, there are many benefits to interplanting edibles and ornamentals. It looks better, it cuts down on pests or diseases jumping from plant to plant, it attracts pollinators which increases your food yield. Ornamentals can also provide environmental benefits that edibles alone cannot: they can be the mainstays of rain gardens or drought-tolerant gardens. They also provide a bigger boost to home values.

3) Many people are into planting only U.S. native plants. (That is, of course, if they live in the U.S. It would be a bit odd to live in Spain and insist on a garden of U.S. natives unless you maintain a botanical garden or are a seriously homesick ex-pat.) There are good reasons for that: native plants are unlikely to be invasive, they are likely to thrive in our climate, they will attract pollinators. Many, probably most, of my go-to plants are natives or hybrids of natives. However, there are some U.S. natives that have some problems thriving (my bee balm and phlox get powdery mildew every summer without fail). And there are some non-U.S. natives that have a long history that establishes they are not invasive, thrive here, and attract pollinators. Some examples of plants that meet all these criteria in my own gardens (which of course does not guarantee they will thrive in yours – more on that later): Caradonna salvia, limelight four o’clock*, Russian sage, certain sedums, kniphofia, delosperma, alcea rugosa, centranthus ruber, and begonia boliviensis. Some may disagree with me on this, of course, so I will try to remember to note which plants I discuss are natives in case a reader wants to use solely native plants.

4) Many people are also into avoiding hybrids and focusing on heirlooms or species plants. This is also something I’m not particularly religious about. Some heirlooms are great. Hybrid marigolds and impatiens are ugly and dull, but some of the heirloom/species ones are awesome. I grew heirloom tomatoes last year, which were not only amazingly delicious, but thoughtfully scattered their seeds for me so I have twice as many plants this year, for free. (Hybrids are usually either sterile or the seeds produce a plant significantly different from the mother plant. If you’ve ever been unsuccessful in growing seeds from fruit you got in the supermarket, it is likely because many of the fruits you buy are hybrids.) Heirlooms often have a beautiful look or scent that was weeded out when hybridizers were striving for some other characteristics. It should be noted that hybridization should not conjure up an Island-of-Dr.-Moreau-like vision of freakish mutations that were never meant to be. Hybrids are not necessarily the brainchild of an evil Monsanto-like corporation bent on world domination. Many hybrids occur naturally via cross-pollination by bees or butterflies. Others are the result of home gardeners having a little fun and experimenting. Some hybrids also really do have more desirable characteristics than the species, and I use them when that is the case.

5) I don’t use any chemicals and almost no fertilizers (with two exceptions). First of all, it’s better for the environment. Second, I don’t want to deal with that kind of maintenance. I can live with a few insect-eaten holes, as long as a plant isn’t decimated. If a plant needs constant tending with chemicals (I’m looking at you, hybrid tea roses), then it’s a plant I don’t need. I might give a spray or two with neem oil, but that’s it. The right plant in the right place in the right soil doesn’t need fertilizer or chemicals. Extremely reluctantly, I made a new exception this year. We got our yard treated with pesticides for ticks and mosquitoes. Doing so probably kills pollinators – most worrisomely, honeybees. Last year, I tried every natural method (getting rid of standing water, planting tons of mosquito-repelling plants, etc). If it worked at all, it didn’t work well enough. None of my family wanted to go outside because they were bitten alive by mosquitos, and one of my sons contracted Lyme disease. The other exception I’ll get to in a later post. Happily, I’ve noticed plenty of pollinators, and no mosquitoes or ticks.

6) Getting rid of lawn is generally good. However, unless you will really never use it, keep some grass around. Grass is simply the single best plant for standing up to foot traffic. If you have kids or dogs especially, they’ll spend more time outside if there’s some lawn.

Here are the topics I thought I’d cover. Please let me know in the comments if there are any others you’d like me to take on.

1) How to select sites and prepare beds and containers.

2) Knowing plants: what are annuals, biannuals, perennials, sub-shrubs, shrubs, and trees? Which plants would suit your garden?

3) Sustainable practices: selecting drought-tolerant plants, rain garden plants, using rain barrels, etc. How to avoid using chemicals and fertilizers, and still stop critters from eating your plants. Best practices for grass lawns.

4) Design principles: how to make landscaping look good.

5) Seeds, bulbs, and propagation 101.

6) How to put plants in the ground and make sure they stay alive with as little maintenance as possible.

7) How to put plants in containers and make sure they stay alive with as little maintenance as possible.

8) Design for special populations: gardens that especially suit children or people with disabilities.

Any other questions? Let me know in the comments what you want to know!

*Four o’clocks can attract Japanese beetles (although that didn’t happen in my garden). Many gardeners therefore use them as bait amongst edibles. The Japanese beetles go for the four o’clocks, and leave the cukes alone.

Occasionally, landscape gardening goes well beyond flowers and shrubbery to encompass questions of national identity, culture, even social change. The era from 1900 to 1930 in America was one of those times, thanks to several enterprising and unsung women.

Well before American women could vote, these college-educated few rose to the pinnacle of their fields as garden designers, writers and photographers. Declaring American gardens to be distinct from those in Europe, they took as their mission the beautification of America, whose cities were polluted and whose residents were suffering from decades of grinding income disparity and rampant industrialism.

The New York Botanical Garden — itself a creation of that Progressive “push-back” between the height of the Gilded Age and World War I — explores these women and their work in “Groundbreakers: Great American gardens in the 20th century and the women who designed them,” a suite of exhibits on view through Sept. 7.

“Groundbreakers” explores the work of garden designers Marian Coffin, Beatrix Farrand and Ellen Shipman, and garden photographers Jessie Tarbox Beals, Mattie Edwards Hewitt and Frances Benjamin Johnston.

It combines original hand-tinted glass “magic lantern” slides and the hefty photographic equipment used to make them; detailed drawings of some of the greatest estate gardens of the time; gardening journalism and literary writing; and breathtakingly colorful flower gardens — most notably one evoking the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller garden in Seal Harbor, Maine (complete with Ragtime musical accompaniment).

“These women were the leading lights in their fields. And in a broader cultural sense, the work they did helped elevate the quality of life for many people across America through these landscapes and their photos and writing,” said Todd Forrest, the botanical garden’s vice president of Horticulture and Living Collections.

“This brief Progressive era is especially important to look at now as historians ask themselves how, in our present gilded age, we’re going to get this kind of momentum again,” explained Sam Watters, the historian whose “Gardens for a Beautiful America” book (Acanthus Press) helped inspire the show, and who curated its photographic segment.

Among the nation’s first specialized career women, the women highlighted in the show not only designed gardens for private estates but educated and informed the public through lectures, writing and photos, Watters said.

Their work helped inspire the construction of landscaped parks and gardens across the country, the expansion of tree-lined streets, and the widespread planting of the lush lawns, bordered by flowers and ornamental shrubs, that remain emblematic of American yards today.

“Garden club women, inspired by the garden photos they saw, started going to prisons. They put a rose garden in the courtyard of Sing Sing. A big formal garden with a fountain was put in a prison in Michigan. And they planted gardens around train stations across the country,” Watters said.

“It really was landscape gardening as social activism.”

On the great estates, the cutting edge of landscape design at the time, photographs were commissioned and schoolchildren brought in, with the edification of the masses in mind.

Whereas 19th-century American gardens replicated gardens in Europe, these new gardens combined Asian architectural elements, English-style flower borders, European ideas of space and distinctly North American settings for a unique sensibility. And before there was color photography, the lush hand-tinted coloring of Johnston’s lantern slides awed and inspired home gardeners.

The show is ambitious and sprawling, and experiencing it in its entirety requires the better part of a day. Although the exhibits can be viewed in any order, the story flows best by beginning in the garden’s Mertz Library Rotunda with “Gardens for a Beautiful America: The women who photographed them,” curated by Watters. Along with photos, books, magazines and journals of the period, the exhibit features examples of the era’s imposing wooden camera equipment — gardening photography required serious biceps — along with a few original lantern slides.

Two of Farrand’s masterpieces are on view in the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden and in “Mrs. Rockefeller’s Garden,” a dazzlingly colorful indoor horticultural exhibit. Shipman designed the garden’s Ladies’ Border, and Coffin designed the Montgomery Conifers Collection.

The show also includes a “Poetry Walk,” featuring poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay, many inspired by her garden in Austerlitz, New York; a section on “Groundbreaking Women in Science”; a series of concerts, films, lectures and poetry readings; a free iPhone app with previously unpublished photos; and a section for kids on the science and art of landscape photography.

GROUNDBREAKERS: GREAT AMERICAN GARDENS AND THE WOMEN WHO DESIGNED THEM

WHERE, WHEN:

New York Botanical Gardens, 2900 Southern Blvd., Bronx, New York, through Sept. 7

ADMISSION:

All-Garden Pass weekends through June: $25; $22, student/senior; $10, children 2-12;

weekdays weekends through Sept. 7:$20;