Author. Teacher. Designer. Activist.
Used to work at a blanket factory but it folded.
Benjamin Vogt is owner of Prairie Up, formerly Monarch Gardens, offering garden design, online classes, workshops, webinars, and guidebooks. He is the author of A New Garden Ethic: Cultivating Defiant Compassion for an Uncertain Future, as well as Prairie Up: An Introduction to Natural Garden Design. His forthcoming book, Unlawning America, will be released by Timber Press in 2026/27. Benjamin’s work has been featured in Dwell, Fine Gardening, Horticulture, Midwest Living, the New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. He is based in Nebraska and works nationally.
I grew up with a mother who was constantly outside in the landscape. I remember hot weekend afternoons cleaning up shrub and plant trimmings, and cool summer morning sprints to a string of local nurseries for something new.
But while being in the home landscape with my mother planted a seed in me, it was the overall urban / suburban wildness of my Minnesota youth that made a deep, lasting impression. Small woodlands filled with vocal wildlife, ponds and lakes dotting every bend in the road — and the distinct, evocative seasons rich in their personalities.
As I’ve grown older my earliest years living in Oklahoma have resurfaced, especially with research trips for an historical memoir based on my German Mennonite family, Native American Plains tribes, and the flora and fauna of southern grasslands. The vast openness, the wind, the mixed grass prairie, all have just as deeply colored my emotional and physical aesthetics as the woods of Minnesota. I’m honored to live in a diverse state like Nebraska, where prairies meet forest and mountain, and where millions of migrating birds and insects give new resonance to the definition of flyover country.
Benjamin’s design work has been featured in The American Gardener, Better Homes and Gardens, Dwell, Fine Gardening, Gardenista, Garden Design, Horticulture, Midwest Living, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. For five years Benjamin wrote an award-winning garden column for Houzz which garnered over 3 million reads with 200 articles.
His home landscape is profiled in the book American Roots (Timber Press). He is frequently interviewed in print and podcasts while speaking nationally on environmental activism and sustainable urban design for wildlife.
Benjamin is author of several books, including the disruptive, call to action A New Garden Ethic: Cultivating Defiant Compassion for an Uncertain Future (watch the presentation based on the book) as well as Prairie Up: An Introduction to Natural Garden Design. The former is in its 4th printing, and the latter in its 6th printing having sold 11,500 copies in its first year.
Active on social media with over 80,000 followers, he runs the Facebook page Milk the Weed.
Benjamin has an M.F.A. (The Ohio State University) and Ph.D. (University of Nebraska-Lincoln) in English and has taught over fifty college classes for which he’s received multiple awards. That’s right, Benjamin went to school to study writing poetry, memoir, and environmental literature.
He lives in Lincoln, Nebraska with his wife, son, and two rescue cats.
