If you're looking for the best books on sustainable, wildlife friendly, low management garden design, here's your list. I've broken it down into user-friendly categories.

Why
Bringing Nature Home -- Doug Tallamy -- The science of why native plants are critical for wildlife, especially insects.
The Living Landscape -- Doug Tallamy and Rick Darke -- Thoughts and examples of resilient landscapes for wildlife.

How
Planting in a Post-Wild World -- Thomas Rainer and Claudia West -- It starts with the why, that get more theoretical and practical. This is a more advanced book, so you might want to read the "why" first, and even the next book.
The Know Maintenance Perennial Garden -- Roy Diblik -- How to create sustainable, layered, lush, seasonal gardens that look good year round and require less inputs over time. Complete with plants lists and blueprints.

Deeper Why
Principles of Ecological Landscape Design -- Travis Beck -- Principles and strategies for creating resilient landscapes. The way we've been to taught to garden and landscape isn't working, not for us, wildlife, or our cities.

For Whom
Pollinators of Native Plants -- Heather Holm -- A list of common forbs east of the Rockies and the pollinators that both use and rely on them.

Even Deeper Why
A New Garden Ethic -- Benjamin Vogt (hey that's me!) -- Urban and suburban gardens need a radical change for wildlife, climate change, and our own physical / mental health. Nature is crying for us to come back home.

And because we need pictures, have recent shots of a truly radical backyard that's sequestering carbon, improving soil, cleaning water, and providing functional beauty for wildlife and two humans:

It's National Pollinator Week starting June 19 and I wanted to show you more from home base. Here on my 1/4 acre lot I experiment with different plants, plant combinations, and various ways to establish gardens. If you follow me on my social media channels like Instagram and Milk the Weed (Facebook), you'll have seen some of these images. I want to focus on the back lawn, which was a space I never watered, that burned bad each summer, and was simply a wasted space. As the years went by I felt ridiculous for having lawn. Just a few feet away was a 1,500' garden full of pollinators, spiders, frogs, birds, etc. I began to see the unused lawn as lazy and selfish, a place no one could call home, a place that did not amend the soil or sequester carbon or cool the air around my home. Besides, I'm a gardener. Give me more plants!

Instead of a needy fescue lawn, one that suprisingly got patchier if I let it go to seed, let me tell you what I did. In the fall of 2015 I scalped the lawn, raked up as much thatch as I could (about 3-4 passes with a manual rake), exposed soil, and sowed flower seeds I'd saved from the previous year. I then put in about 150 seedlings I'd grown, as well as some 3" pots and plugs, and let it sit. In the spring of 2016 I kept it mowed at the highest setting until about mid June. Ideally, I would have mowed it the entire year because boy oh boy did the foxtail get bad, and I ended up manually deadheading seed on hundreds of plants just so I could have some prairie flowers blooming.

This spring, 2017, I mowed until about early to Mid may and have since let it do its thing. Little bluestem and sideoats grama are now by far the prominent grass, which is all the bright green in the above images. I sowed some pioneer forbs that I thought I'd need to shade out the fescue -- mexican hat coneflower and black-eyed susan mostly -- but the short prairie grasses are doing the job for me. Yes, the fescue lawn has bloomed and gone to seed, but I don't believe it will be able to procreate.

Over time I will:
1) Mow a path through the space (I'd like some things to set seed this year)
2) Remove / thin more aggressive species like wild senna
3) Deadhead indian grass and big bluestem so they don't take over (I only have a few of each for winter structure)
4) Thin seedlings of some more architectural and seasonal-blooming plants to preserve a slight sense of order and rhythm that even in a wilder space our eyes look for. Clumps and drifts. Think about a prairie, and how the plants guide you, how we look for patterns to connect to and navigate the landscape. It doesn't take much editing, and in the end, the plants are still allowed to move and do their thing -- to show me what they want and need.
5) Mow it all down each March (I'd love to burn).

Stay tuned to see this space for progress week by week. The asters will be especially spectacular this year. Come on, fall!

And below are a few more shots from out front, where some 400' of unused lawn that burned even worse was taken out in favor of two more designed beds. The landscape had a blueprint and allows for some plants to self sow to fill in the gaps over time. Not that the hellstrip was left to blend into the neighborhood, and a 6' wide lawn path bisects the two beds, showing purpose and human use while tying into the rest of the neighborhood. Both the front and back areas are never watered. Both provide winter habitat. Both represent a wildlife refuge and an island that connects to a tallgrass prairie one mile south.

And in case you forgot here's the 10 year old main garden, which is about 75% native plants:

I stumbled upon David Orr's wonderful essay "Love It or Lose It," which I think I stumbled upon years ago and forgot. The guy is speaking my language, and the language of my forthcoming book A New Garden Ethic. His focus is certainly on rewilding our daily lives -- cities, suburbia -- and lamenting our role as stewards who don't know much. His call is not for a technological revolution, but a spiritual, moral, and cultural revolution of the likes seldom or never seen before. Choosing and cultivating life is as constant an exercise as love.

"Beyond efficiency, we need another revolution that transforms our ideas of what it means to live decently and how little is actually necessary for a decent life: a sufficiency revolution. The first revolution is mostly about technology and economics. The second revolution is about morality and human purposes. The biophilia revolution is about the combination of reverence for life and purely rational calculation by which we will want to both be efficient and live sufficiently. It is about finding our rightful place on earth and in the community of life, and it is about citizenship, duties, obligations, and celebration.

There are two formidable barriers standing in our way. The first is the problem of denial. We have not yet faced up to the magnitude of the trap we have created for ourselves. We are still thinking of the crisis as a set of problems that are, by definition, solvable with technology and money. In fact we face a series of dilemmas that can be avoided only through wisdom and a higher and more comprehensive level of rationality than we have yet shown. Better technology would certainly help; however, our crisis is not fundamentally one of technology but one of mind, will, and spirit. Denial must be met by something like a worldwide ecological “perestroika,” predicated on the admission of failure: the failure of our economics, which became disconnected from life; the failure of our politics, which lost sight of the moral roots of our commonwealth; the failure of our science, which lost sight of the essential wholeness of things; and the failures of all of us as moral beings, who allowed these things to happen because we did not love deeply and intelligently enough. The biophilia revolution must come as an ecological enlightenment that sweeps out the modern superstition that we are knowledgeable enough and good enough to manage the earth and to direct evolution."

from "Love It or Lose It: The Coming Biophilia Revolution"

Thought I'd show a few images of some projects that are in year one and year two. The first is a private residence. Several acres around the home have been seeded in a high-diverse prairie mix by Prairie Plains Resource Institute, which will provide wonderful wildlife habitat and, eventually, mitigate a lot of runoff issues. But for the very front of the house we went with a slightly more designed prairie look. Modest drifts and masses of various native flowers and grasses will mingle and ultimately fuse with a sedge area near the home's walls, and plants will self sow over time ensuring evocative stands of blooms from April through October.

This garden is about 3,000 square feet, and with the house, sits atop a hill that slopes down to a pond, so sight lines from within the home outward to the wonderful landscape are preserved with generally shorter plants that will melt into the seeded tallgrass going down the hill. Several of the flowering perennials were chosen for their high attractiveness to both diverse and charismatic insect species, this way the family could just step out the front door and be engulfed in nature taking flight all around them.

All of the planting areas will be sown with sideoats grama, a low bunch grass with ornamental orange blooms and solid seed head action in fall. This will create a calm, modern base layer which should take well to future flower self sowing. Clumps of sedge are also scattered in the beds -- in a pointillist fashion -- further out from the home to add early-season green, increase plant diversity, and help tie areas together.

Below is an update of the Cornhusker Council Boy Scout's of America headquarters east of Lincoln, planted last fall. It's about 2,000 square feet of developing sedge meadow in a challenging space where portions get a lot of shade half the day, then blistering afternoon sun. Weeds out in the country have been a problem, but they are primarily the annual variety, so the goal is simply to keep them from blooming and setting seed. What this means is cutting them down to the ground with minimal pulling, the latter which would disturb the soil, bring more seeds to the surface, and create open soil for new blown-in seeds to establish. The sedge, Carex brevior, is looking very strong as forbs and some sweeps of grasses slowly establish this first year.

And just for kicks, another image of our front meadow beds at home base -- converted in fall 2014 from lawn that burned every summer. Last year I added a lot of sedge, and some flowers like nodding onion, to bulk up open areas. But the sideoats grama, prairie dropseed, and little bluestem are filling in the gaps fairly quickly. This spring I put in a few more rattlesnake master, some blue hyssop, and soon a drift of our native heuchera prairie alumroot (great foliage contrast and stellar spring flower stalks when massed).

I do some light deadheading and pinching back of plants this time of year. Asters like aromatic and New England might get sheered 50% back (before July 4) to control size and increase blooms, while other asters have growing tips nipped for more fall flowers. I deadhead all Zizia aurea, golden alexanders, that I can easily see and get to, in order to limit my garden becoming a Zizia garden. That being said, I'd be happy if they spread like the dickens out in the lawn-to-meadow garden. 

My clay soil is cracking with some deep chasms forming in open areas, which just goes to show that open areas are bad news. Exposed clay soil can open up roots to dry air and sunlight. So we need to think about layering and planting densely where we can to shade soil, increase water penetration, enrich soil, compete against weeds and make for a better looking space overall.

All this being said, of my 5,000' only a few news plants get a drink in these hot days. Besides, out front, both of my neighbor's sprinkler systems shoot way over into my drought-tolerant prairie beds, and the one waters twice a day in high wind about late afternoon. I tell you what. You shouldn't have to plan a garden taking into account neighborhood over watering.

I often just show images of the backyard gardens because, well, they are in the back where I can be a cloistered introvert. And I'm also enamored with the lawn to meadow business going on. But the front beds deserve an update because they are another big suburban paradigm shift. You can tell just how big by noticing how many neighbors were watering this morning when I was checking on things. (All three of my nearest neighbors were watering and one goes twice a day.)

Plants are filling in. Last year I added about 50 Carex brevior plugs to beef things up and to provide more spring green when neighborhood lawns are also greening up. Black-eyed susans are a bit thuggy so I have to thin their seedlings, and so far the grasses are simply filling in vs. taking over. But that may change. Little bluestem and especially sideoats grama are on the move, but also doing well fighting weeds (very well this spring!).

In the images below you'll see several forbs, including: purple prairie clover, nodding onion, stiff goldenrod, aromatic aster, purple coneflower, pale purple coneflower, meadow blazingstar. and hidden in there somewhere a lead plant, dwarf baptisia, butterflyweed, and purple poppy mallow. I added blue hyssop this spring to a very bare, large-ish area where it can reseed itself in a nice grouping.

Other plants not making an appearance below are rattlesnake master and smooth aster. There is a 6' wide lawn pathway that divides the two beds, which are in total about 450 square feet. Nothing is taller than 2' within several feet of the sidewalk or driveway, and there is always something in bloom starting about mid May into late October.