Personal Bio

I grew up with a mother who was constantly outside in the landscape. I remember hot weekend afternoons cleaning up shrub and plant trimmings, and cool summer morning sprints to a string of local nurseries for something new. 

But while being in the home landscape with my mother planted a seed in me, it was the overall urban / suburban wildness of my Minnesota youth that made a deep, lasting impression. Small woodlands filled with vocal wildlife, ponds and lakes dotting every bend in the road -- and the distinct, evocative seasons rich in their personalities.

As I've grown older my earliest years living in Oklahoma have resurfaced, especially with research trips for an historical memoir based on my German Mennonite family, Native American Plains tribes, and the flora and fauna of southern grasslands. The vast openness, the wind, the mixed grass prairie, all have just as deeply colored my emotional and physical aesthetics as the woods of Minnesota. I'm honored to live in a diverse state like Nebraska, where prairies meet forest and mountain, and where millions of migrating birds and insects give new resonance to the definition of flyover country.

Professional Bio

Monarch Gardens is Benjamin Vogt. His design work has been featured in Dwell, Fine Gardening, Horticulture, Midwest Living, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. For five years (2012-2017) Benjamin wrote an award-winning garden column for Houzz (over 3 million reads with 200 articles).

His home landscape is profiled in the book American Roots (Timber Press). He is frequently interviewed while speaking nationally on environmental activism and sustainable urban design for wildlife.

Benjamin is author of several books, including the disruptive, call to action A New Garden Ethic: Cultivating Defiant Compassion for an Uncertain Future  (watch the presentation based on the book) as well as Prairie Up: An Introduction to Natural Garden Design.

Active on social media with nearly 50,000 followers, he runs the Facebook page Milk the Weed and posts frequently on Instagram.

Benjamin has an M.F.A. (Ohio State) and Ph.D. (Nebraska) in English and has taught over fifty college classes for which he's received multiple awards. He is the author of three poetry collections and two unpublished memoirs -- the memoirs are based on family & gardening as well as homesteading the prairie environment in the 1800s.

Benjamin lives in Lincoln, Nebraska with his wife, son, and two rescue cats. And he loves puns / dad jokes:

No matter how much you push the envelope it'll still be stationery. Wearing a clock on your belt is a waist of time. I used to work at a blanket factory but it folded.