Kenton Seth

Kenton Seth is a Fruita, Colorado-based garden designer who is addicted to the cutting edge: obsessed with regional flavor, long-term, sustainable and resource-saving designs, he specializes in native, xeric/dry, and habitat/meadow gardens. He makes rock gardens across the US and overseas, co-authored an international book on Crevice Gardening, and was the American Horticultural Society’s 2024 winner of the Emerging Professional award. 

Seeds Structures and Stewardship???

What does it mean when we talk about “Seeds, Structures, and Stewardship”? We wanted to share some more about the ideas that will be shaping the conversations at Create Beauty 2026.

Seeds: When we are talking about a new approach (or an old approach depending on your perspective) of creating dynamic landscapes with seeds rather than planting small plants. In our generation, the leading thinkers on this approach are James Hitchmough and Nigel Dunnett from England. Hitchmough wrote a seminal text, Sowing Beauty, in which he explained the process by which he created landscapes with seeds. Hitchough and Dunnett put this into practice during the London Olympics when they designed a number of gardens at the Olympic Park. Seeding has the potential to help us address large-scale areas that would be too expensive to plant with many little plants. Seeding is also dynamic - when one plant dies, the sown seedbank is able to fill that space with new seedlings.

Structures: In our practice and designs, we refer to ourselves as ‘plant-driven’. We are plant-driven but we are learning the value of the built structures in our gardens and their potential to promote biodiversity. John Little has been a leading thinker on what structures support a plethora of species. He is introducing new ways of creating structures that fulfill design needs for walls and paths but consider their value to insects and pollinators. Come find out what structures are beneficial and broaden your understanding of what a pollinator garden really needs to support pollinators. Come to Create Beauty 2026.

Stewardship: Stewardship is our term for what the landscape industry calls ‘maintenance’. We have stopped using maintenance to describe the upkeep of a garden because maintenance implies a machine that can be regularly serviced and it performs the same action time and time again. Natural systems are not machines and therefore their care needs to be rethought. Instead of maintaining a garden, we are stewarding the garden, helping keep species in check, promoting species who need a hand. We are responding to weather and exposure and working toward the flourishing of multiple species, both plants and animals. Come and learn at our conference what good stewardship looks like and how we might promote this approach to landscape care.