Permaculture and More in a Minnesota Garden

Heidi Heiland has made a career—indeed a life—out of gardening. She says it’s something she fell into as a teenager, but perhaps it was meant to be. Her great-grandmother gardened on an East Coast property designed by Ellen Biddle Shipman, one of the first prominent female landscape designers. Growing up in Minnesota, Heidi found herself drawn to the craft.

As a 16-year-old working as a “water girl” for a townhome developer in the late 1970s, she noticed all the gardens relied on the same three annuals: red salvia, yellow marigolds and white sweet alyssum. There has to be more than this, young Heidi thought. So at age 17 she began her own gardening business, Heidi’s Lifestyle Gardens, to offer more creative planting to the community.

Heidi did not study horticulture or landscape design at a university, but over the course of her career she has earned many certifications and received awards for her work. She is especially proud of her training in horticultural therapy, permaculture and, most recently, regenerative agriculture. She values gardens and gardening for their potential to help the health of humans, wildlife and ecosystems, a point of view that informs all of her decisions. 

In 2016, she bought a garden center just outside of Minneapolis, expanding her business to Heidi’s GrowHaus & Lifestyle Gardens. At the GrowHaus she sells all types of plants and gardening items, and she continues to provide garden design, installation and maintenance services. The focus remains on sustainability—in what she sells, how she operates the business, her team’s approach to design and maintenance and the education she shares with customers and clients. The garden center revolves around Minnesota-grown plants that succeed in the climate, with an emphasis on native species and on those that feed wildlife and people. 

“We can’t grow just cut flowers, or even just flowers for pollinators,” she says. “It’s so important to grow food for us as well!”

Gardening for More

Words like “as well,” “too” and “also” dot Heidi’s remarks as she speaks, reflecting this passionate gardener’s belief that gardens can and should do at least double duty in their existence. 

“We’re always looking for the overlap between designed horticulture and functional spaces,” she explains of her design approach. “It’s not an ‘either/or.’ It’s an ‘and’.” She points to plants that can be pretty and useful, like strawberries that serve as edible ground covers, or blueberry-bush hedges.

Her own yard, which surrounds the home where she and husband Dan raised their family, is a case in point of the multifunctional garden. The Heiland garden provides beauty—plus sustenance. It protects resources—and draws from them. Like its gardener, it works hard—but leaves space for fun.

And overall, Heidi uses her home garden “as a lab,” she says, a place for trying out techniques and plants before recommending them to others. This is important amid the challenges she’s found specific to her spot in Minnesota, like a short growing season and the soil’s high clay content, and those she recognizes as more universal, like climate change and soil depletion.

Heidi’s area sits in USDA Zone 4a—“but I’ve got it closer to 5 in microclimates,” she notes, “and when I started out, it was a solid Zone 3. We have experienced warming in the past 40 years.” However, she adds that in 2022 she saw no real spring, just a wintery April ahead of summerlike weather.

“We’re seeing these big swings,” she observes, sharing that for the past two years, her area has suffered from drought, in contrast to unusual deluges and flooding in some other regions of the United States. 

In the face of such extremes, Heidi has tried to choose plants resilient to changing conditions and to add more diversity to her gardens and those of her customers, so that whatever the weather brings, there’ll be something that can thrive.

She also stresses the sharing of information, observations and successes between gardeners near and far as an important tool in changing climates. To this end she thinks of her garden center as a “campus” where the gardening community can learn. She offers classes, and she champions innovative products like the Tower Garden, which grows plants aeroponically. 

“We don’t think enough about how plants need air,” she notes. “And I do think one day we’ll run out of soil.” On the topic of soil and air, she also points out Espoma’s Soil Perfector as a good product she’s found while helping clients. The all-natural amendment consists of kiln-fired mineral granules. 

“You till it into clay soil to open up air channels and water opportunities,” Heidi explains. 

Back Home at the Lab

Permaculture tenets and techniques make up many of the practical lessons Heidi has tried and proven in her home-garden lab. Permaculture looks at the garden as a working, self-sustaining whole, with each of its parts—from plants to people to soil to water and more—working as both an essential contributor and a deserving recipient. Often, permaculture is about “stacking functions,” Heidi explains. She points to rain gardens—of which she has five—as an example.

Rain gardens can slow the flow of water, cool the water, store it and clean it. They can be as simple as a depression or ditch or more complex, like Heidi’s permeable driveway. 

In the driveway, water is able to seep into the ground through porous material between pavers. The ground alongside and under the driveway is also fed by a French drain that collects water pouring off the house’s roof via a rain chain. (Heidi prefers these to downspouts because they allow us to see the volume of water coming off the roof. “It gets attention,” she says, “and attention leads to appreciation.”) 

The permeable driveway keeps rainfall from becoming runoff wasted in the gutter. Instead, it’s absorbed into the soil, and in some spots it supports plants—like the squashes and melons that line the edge of the drive. Another runoff preventer lies where the front yard meets the street; here it’s a “skirt” of low-growing plants that absorb water shed by the road before it reaches a storm drain.

In another example of a rain garden, Heidi has created swales that direct water into garden beds rather than into the small lake at the back of the property. She points to the swales as a lesson in observation: First, she noticed where water was idling, then she made swales that overflow one into the next and finally irrigate thirsty plants. However, she then saw that the swales were still overflowing and ultimately leading into the lake. To correct this, she made a hugelkultur bed—a berm built of garden debris and topped with soil and plants—that absorbs the excess water.

Heidi now has two “hugels,” which she reports are still standing strong at about eight years old, even though the base material does decay. She notes they create a microclimate that’s wetter and also warmer, because they’re protected by taller plants. So not only does the swale-and-hugelkulture system stop water loss, but it also expands what Heidi can grow.

Growing Together

Though Heidi is a very purposeful gardener, she counts relaxation and enjoyment among the vital services of the outdoors. She has also learned to let the garden evolve—and to change alongside it. A garden and its gardener can inform each other’s changes, she shows from her own experience.

Heidi relates that she’s not composting as much as she used to, partly because she doesn’t have as much material from within the house now that she and Dan are empty nesters. (She’s also added fairy gardens for their grandchildren, made the hot tub into a kiddie pool and converted the outdoor shower into a trellis for spinach.) 

Heidi describes herself today as “gardening lean”—eschewing time-consuming, labor-intensive tasks like hauling material to a compost bin in favor of smart techniques like the “chop and drop,” which allows stems and leaves to decay right in the bed where they grew.

“Also, now I’m gardening in mature beds, and I’m growing more perennials and shrubs, which tend to need less maintenance” she says. “Maybe I have more knowledge now, so I seem to need to do less. But then again, I also have less time (since opening the GrowHaus).” 

Whatever’s behind it, Heidi recognizes that she “works” less in her garden nowadays, and she gives herself some grace. 

“Should I shame myself, or anyone, for not composting so much?” she asks. “I don’t think so.”

The idea of working “lean” also plays into Heidi’s design style for clients. In beds and borders, she argues for designing “with brushstrokes, not salt and pepper.” That is, rather than scatter similar plants here and there, keep them in sweeps. This makes planning, planting and maintaining the area simpler.

“And this style is easier to appreciate,” she notes. “It’s more restful to look at and experience.” That feeling of peace is something Heidi has come to love about her own garden. Perhaps its best function is what it does for the gardener’s spirit.

“It calms me, and it feeds me," she says.