He’ll Try Anything

ARLINGTON, Va. — Don’t look at the garden in the pictures. This is no place Thomas Rainer wants exposed to the world.

He would be delighted to flip through a few pictures of the spaces he helped design as an associate at the august landscape architecture firm Oehme van Sweden. For instance, the newish azalea collection at the New York Botanical Garden — that’s worth a peek.

Or how about stopping by Mr. Rainer’s influential garden blog, Grounded Design, where he has taken to speaking apostasy against the dogma of green landscaping.

“The native plant movement is, in part, this Protestant idea that it has to hurt in order to do good,” he is likely to say. “In order to support wildlife, to be a better citizen, you have to throw out your dahlias and your peonies. I think that’s too bad. Sustainability should be more hedonistic, more pleasurable.”

He will gladly reveal his whole cosmology, with a garden at the center. But he maintains that no one wants to see his tenth-of-an-acre lot, on a bus line, surrounding a humdrum 1951 rambler in the Washington suburbs.

Mr. Rainer, 37, posted hundreds of essays on the nature (and artifice) of the American landscape before finally sharing the first snapshot of his home garden a few months ago.