When they built a new home on the edge of Theodore Wirth Park, the clients wanted their landscape to honor the wild beauty just beyond their property line rather than fight against it. The design embraces native gardens filled with ornamental grasses that move and sway like the park's own meadows, creating a seamless transition between cultivated yard and protected wilderness. Massive granite boulders punctuate the landscape like geological anchors, their presence echoing the rugged character of Minnesota's glacial past while providing structure and visual weight to the flowing grasses. Rather than treating the backyard as purely ornamental, edible trees weave throughout the plantings – fruit-bearing species that serve both wildlife and the family's table.

The materials create a restrained palette that defers to the park rather than competing with it, allowing the eye to travel naturally from garden to forest without jarring transitions. Native plantings establish themselves with minimal intervention, their deep root systems holding soil while requiring far less water and maintenance than traditional suburban lawns. The result is a landscape that understands its context – neither trying to domesticate the wildness at its doorstep nor pretending to be wilderness itself, but instead finding the graceful middle ground where a home can sit comfortably at the edge of a beloved public park while paying proper respect to the ecosystem that makes the location so special.