He'll Try Anything - NYTimes.com 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. "I've been petrified to do it," he said on a recent Sunday. "I teach planting design" - Mr. Rainer is an adjunct at George Washington University - "and I'm kind of the planting-design go-to guy at work. I have a blog. A lot of credibility is riding on what I would do in my own garden. And yet the circumstances have been that this is not a house or a garden that will ever be a masterpiece. With the dead season on the way, Mr. Rainer was feeling reflective about what his plants had done, and failed to do, over the summer. There are, in a sense, two gardens here to autopsy. The first is a native bed (or "native-ish," he said), with perennial grasses and shrubs like chokeberry, ninebark, winterberry and Virginia sweetspire. The plan is for these woodland edge plants to grow in and form a bulwark against the busy street. The second, which his brother-in-law has christened "the duck blind," is a screened border planting filled with annuals and exuberant oddments. If Mr. Rainer's eye weren't critical enough, his wife, Melissa Rainer, 41, is also a landscape architect. They work together at Rhodeside & Harwell in Washington. "If I did an as-built plan for the garden," Mr. Rainer said, "it might go against quite a lot of what I would teach in a class." Ms. Rainer said, "It "might" or "absolutely would?" " The home garden of the horticulture professional is a strange place, said Todd Forrest, the vice president for horticulture and living collections at the New York Botanical Garden. While a tradition of excellence is the standard at work, he said, "I would never look at another gardener's garden critically - like, "Wow, your turf looks spotty." " Of Mr. Forrest's own one-acre yard in Ridgefield, Conn., he said, "it's not designed in any way, shape or form." Instead, he is conducting a casual field trial of which New England plants are unpalatable to Odocoileus virginianus, the demon ungulate known as the white-tailed deer. Mr. Forrest sees the same spirit of inquiry in Grounded Design, and he has invited Mr. Rainer to speak at the botanical garden in March. "He's very self-critical," Mr. Forrest said. In some ways, self-deprecating. He doesn't proclaim any expertise, except the expertise of passionate inquiry and honest reporting. What is Mr. Rainer's honest evaluation of his own garden, then? "There's a disregard for the colors matching all together," he said. And the plant heights are all over the place, like a seventh-grade class photo. In sum, "It lacks coherence." Where, for instance, did the 11-foot-tall Abyssinian banana plants come from and why are they growing above a native mountain mint? Ms. Rainer addressed the first question: The couple like to browse the houseplant section of the nursery, where everything costs $5. Stick it in the ground in April and you have a giant by fall.