According to landscape architect Perry Guillot — the green thumb behind some of the most beautiful gardens along the coastal Northeast — the secret to breathtaking flora lies in a rather straightforward approach: keeping things simple and letting nature take its course. Here, he shares some tricks of the trade and talks to us about what he most looks forward to planting now.

The secret to creating a beautiful garden…
Understanding the natural forces at play and the potential of a given site is key.

Every great gardener knows…
The best landscapes take time to mature, no matter how generous the project budget.

An easy way to update your garden…
A hard pruning to open up the ground plain to more sunshine.

If your space is small, I suggest starting with…
Seasonal flowering vines supported on the building walls — it will take up far less space.

In the spring and summer I always look forward to planting…
Old-fashioned fragrant flowering sweet peas.

The garden I’m most inspired by right now…
My own. Clearly it’s the one I get to see and experience the most. Each early spring I anxiously anticipate how the fig trees might have made it through the winter.

My favorite garden in the whole world…
Great Dixter in Kent, England. The incredible variety of flowering plantings is so masterfully arranged into such a small landscape. It celebrates garden themes that I will most likely never attempt.

‎The garden I’ve never visited but have always dreamed of seeing…
Not a garden but the monumental landscapes of remote New Zealand. Those Lord of the Rings movies shot there are gorgeous!