Welcome, comrades.
Day after tomorrow, the world!

    RENEGADE GARDENER is the Web's best site for gardeners seeking truth, hope, and one lousy sign that someone unfettered by industry prejudice is interested in helping you become a better gardener.

     Originally designed to help gardeners banished to the forgotten USDA Zones 2-4, bold, universal content has made it one of the Web’s most-linked gardening sites. Gardening is gardening, design is design, dumb is dumb, and truth conquers all!

Click HERE for Don's 2012
national speaking schedule


The Renegade Gardener is Don Engebretson,
an award-winning Minnesota garden
writer and designer.

The Story of the Renegade Gardener

The 10 Tenets of
Renegade Gardening

Full version is required reading; CLICK HERE.

  1. Gardening should be challenging, relaxing, and fun.
  2. Renegade Gardeners are cautious and wise when perusing the plethora of products and plants sold by the commercial gardening industry.
  3. Gardening involves commitment.
  4. Renegade Gardeners learn the Latin names of the plants they grow.
  5. Gardening is not always easy.
  6. Renegade Gardeners come to realize that lawns are essentially a dumb idea.
  7. Gardening and rock music do not mix.
  8. Renegade Gardeners buy first from local growers.
  9. There is nothing wrong with cutting down a tree on your property.
  10. Irreverence is essential.
Form Foundation

02-04-11 – What shape is your garden in? Careful, it’s a trick question.

The answer I hope you can give is, “all!” although a confident “many” will do. Learning to create plant combinations with an eye toward the overall shape of each plant is a key design skill crucial to advancing your landscape to higher levels of intrigue and beauty. Yet shape – more properly, “form,” when referring to a plant – is perhaps the least understood and appreciated component to garden design.

Placing plants, remember, is all about creating contrasts. Mixing up a pleasing pallet of bloom colors is Level 1, typically the first design concept new gardeners comprehend and play with, when their only goal in life is creating a pretty flower garden. As you advance, you should stumble upon Level 2: The realization that foliage contrast (leaf shape, size, texture, color) is hugely important – more important than flower color contrast, since the perennials’ foliage exists in the landscape all season (the trees and shrubs, all year) while the bloom color comes and goes.

Which brings us to Level 3: Creating contrasts in plant forms. Here are the forms you have to play with:

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Current Column will be updated March 1