Wild Ones Capital Region NY offers tours of two gardens on Sunday, September 20, 2026. Register here to attend.
Mills Park in the village of Kinderhook, is a one-acre meadow park in its 10th year of growth. Its native plants have been grown mainly from seed or propagated from division of mature plants. The park had been a mowed green with almost no visitors but is now a site of walks, picnics, conversations, and rest. Volunteers planted the park and continue with its maintenance, along with Kinderhook’s Department of Public Works. A mowed and level grass path circles through the park.
Sigrid Gray came to Kinderhook from a career in public gardens in NYC, initially the gardener at Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, then Director of Horticulture at The Battery growing the gardens of Dutch plantsman Piet Oudolf. She has been a catalyst in the development of Kinderhook’s meadow park. Her 1-acre garden in Kinderhook involves no lawn, no leaf removals, water capture from the barn roof into a swale that waters an increasing selection of moisture-loving native plants. A gravel path circles through the barn garden which is a gentle slope. The barn section of the landscape is in its 4th-year of growth, while the landscape around the house is 12-years along. The property is 85%-90% native species, but other than house/barn/paths the landscape has been solidly planted (plugs, seeds) with no lawn. Fallen leaves are never removed but added to the landscape as paths are cleared.