HOW IT ALL BEGAN

Hello! Thanks for stopping by. Our names are Katie & Karl Kloos, and we love nature! You know those people who are always stopping to look at a tree, a flower, a bug or maybe they heard a bird call that they have to investigate? Our family and friends would be the first to point their fingers at us! We feel such a strong appreciation for nature and its future that we decided to start Northern Natural Gardens. We believe passionately that our style of natural gardening can help to restore the native ecosystems that once thrived here in the Twin Cities.

Our love of nature has been strong since we were kids, but our passion for restoring it on a residential level took off when we bought our home. All of a sudden we owned a house and occupied the land it sits on.

To give you a little background, when we started house hunting we were running a small wedding photography business out of our apartment in Saint Paul. We were working a crazy amount of hours, most of which were spent cooped up in our office editing photos. In that editing “dungeon” (as we so lovingly called it), we started dreaming of owning our own home with a magical yard that could be our private escape into nature.

We started diving into everything garden related. Watching British gardening shows and discovering the amazing Monty Don (if you haven’t yet, go watch something of his on Netflix, you can thank us later), and reading or listening to podcasts about plants became our norm.

For Karl though, it was something different. Karl already had 5 years of experience working for a landscaping company (Twin City Landscape, whom we still work with often) and before that had a very strong gardening passion that most likely was passed down from his parents. I (this is Katie speaking, by the way) on the other-hand was a bit more typical for my generation, and hardly had any gardening experience. Karl was already leaps ahead of me on this journey, and had some very specific ideas in mind when it came to how we would want to design our yard at this future home of ours.

He had some basic knowledge of native plants and why they are important, and knew he wanted to use them in our future dream garden. I was more interested in creating something beautiful for us and wildlife to enjoy. If you have been following us on Instagram for a while, you may have read one of our older posts where I tell the story about a native plant garden in our old neighborhood. He made the point to show it to me, and I can very clearly remember pointing and saying, “yeah I like this garden, but not that plant. What plant was that? Well, it was Common Milkweed. I thought it looked like a weed and should not be in a residential garden. GEEZ! So, that is where I started on this journey, and there was obviously a long way to go! That was a huge turning point for both of us.

From there, Karl switched his focus from “gardening for aesthetics”, to “why native plants are important”, and that is when everything changed!

Karl quickly realized that even a well-intentioned person (ahem, me) can still be blinded by generations of gardening culture and norms. We discovered two things that got me 100% on board. The first was the documentary Minnesota: A History of the Land. The documentary just so happened to be airing on PBS. After catching the first episode, we made sure to tune in so we could finish the rest of the series. I cannot say enough good things about it! Like the title says, it walks through the entire history of the land here in Minnesota, and paints a very realistic (and sometimes horrifying) picture of how we have dramatically altered this state. If you want to watch it, which if you live in Minnesota then you definitely should, then I recommend you check to see if your local library as a copy - we have it here at the Roseville library.

The second inspiration was Doug Tallamy’s lecture Restoring Nature’s Relationships at Home. I will never forget watching that first lecture of his. While editing photos, it was pretty common for us to listen to music, podcasts, or lectures. By about the 5 minute mark, I realized we both had stopped editing and were completely enthralled with his words. Suddenly my understanding of nature, its plants, animals, insects and their relationships to one another had dramatically changed! It was a lightbulb moment!

I finally understood the importance of having that “weedy” Milkweed in our garden. I learned that our native insects and native plants had evolved together and depend on one another in a way that non-native plants and our native insects never could.

After watching that lecture, I told Karl I was hooked on native plants and whatever we had to do in our future yard to help restore the balance of nature, was fine by me! So, by the time we were seriously looking at houses, we were scrolling past all the interior photos and skipping right to the backyard. That is how we found our home. It was truly the yard that sold us. A blank canvas ready to be reimagined.

Before our offer was even accepted, Karl had finished the design for our whole yard. It was so incredibly fitting that we were standing in the backyard when we heard our offer was accepted! We closed in November, and that March we dug out the garden spaces, seeded with native plants, mulched with pine straw, and excitedly began waiting for the seeds to germinate. By that July, we had sea of yellow (Black-eyed Susans), and I just knew we were onto something different that could have a life-changing effect on us, our ecosystem, and hopefully other homeowners.

It was only a couple months later, that we understood just how true that was. Some of our family and friends had seen our gardens and asked us to do theirs. That fall, we installed our second natural garden, and the following spring, we installed our third and fourth. Even though they were for people we knew, we were feeling incredibly optimistic that there had to be others out there who were interested in helping nature and would be willing to give up some of their lawn or traditional gardens for the greater good.

After 7 years of being wedding photographers, we decided to close the doors to our first business and take a chance at this new mission-based work. We have now enjoyed five seasons of natural wonder in our own yard and have shared that beauty with dozens of homeowners across the Twin Cities. We are beyond excited for the future of Northern Natural Gardens, and all of the great change and beauty we can bring to Minnesota.

watching our garden grow

From that very first day we laid the seed for our native plants, we have found ourselves captivated by what nature is capable of. While we have been a helpful guide, our natural gardens have taken on a beautiful life of their own. We decide the borders of our gardens, where to cast the seeds and plant the trees, but ultimately the seeds will choose when and where to germinate and many factors go into where their plant successors will ultimately grow again and again, and again. Every year our seed bank grows and so does our love for our natural garden! We invite you to join in on this exciting journey!