About Us
Started in 2013 as GreenTec Nursery LLC, Paddle Creek Gardens now focuses on natural garden design and gardening for wildlife. We focus on offering helpful information on how to restore life to gardens and landscapes everywhere.
Mission
To realize the potential in every landscape to support life.
Vision
An abundance of life in every garden.
Values
Every garden counts: No space is too small.
Don’t let perfect be a roadblock to better.
A garden full of life is a lot more enjoyable.
Wildlife spends a lot more time in your yard than you do.
Why Paddle Creek Gardens?
Flowing through a ravine in a mature second-growth Beech-Sugar Maple forest, Paddle Creek is a small tributary of Eagle Creek in historic Traders Point, a highly picturesque historical district of Northwest Indianapolis.
Though not a large area by any means, this creek and the woods surrounding it was my favorite place to explore as a child. It is here I got to know the plants and wildlife that call these woods home, and where my interest in native plant communities really took root.
In the mind of a youth, these woods seemed to stretch on indefinitely – Now, however I am well aware that this patch of forest is only a sliver of what covered our state, and the whole of the eastern United States. Even these small remnant patches are disappearing every year as more land gets swallowed up in development.
As we develop more land and take up more space, it’s going to become even more important to ensure our gardens are providing ecological function as well as aesthetics – Our mission at Paddle Creek Gardens is to ensure that the potential to support life is realized in every garden, and it’s our passion to provide gardeners – Professionals and amateurs alike – with the tools and resources they need to bring their landscapes to life.
Affiliate Disclosure
Paddle Creek Gardens is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.
As an Amazon Affiliate this site earns a commission from qualifying purchases.
About the Owner
Hello! I am Aaron Diener, the primary author of this blog and the founder of Paddle Creek Gardens.
I been an avid gardener from a young age, and from the earliest days have been particularly interested in natural landscape design and gardening for the benefit of wildlife.
I always wanted to share my experiences and get others on board with this design ethic, and started GreenTec Nursery in 2013 as a way to provide gardeners with a source for hard-to-find native plants.
In 2023, I made the decision to finally close the plant nursery (At least for the time being!) in order to focus fully on becoming a comprehensive resource for natural landscape design and ecologically functional landscape design. While a difficult decision – I always loved growing and shipping the native plants – I feel this decision is the best way for me to focus in on making a difference in the home garden arena.
A Note on Place
Since we are located in Central Indiana, my primary area of focus is on the Central Hardwood Forest region, a high-level ecoregion that encompasses much of the temperate hardwood and mixed forests of the Eastern United States and Southeast Canada. We are on the western edge of this region, with prairie and woodland savanna becoming more common as you head West.
That said, the core ethic and principals of natural garden design and gardening for the benefit of wildlife apply everywhere and in every place – I hope to provide gardeners with the information they need to really find out more about the wild places around them, and how they can distill those places down to human scale size in their own backyards.
These core principles, though I write from Central Indiana, apply from Boston to Bakersfield, and from Boise to Birmingham! Every place has an abundance of native plants and natural communities to draw inspiration from, and every place has countless species of native bees, butterflies, birds, and other forms of fauna that have adapted to live in those natural communities and rely on the food that those native plants provide.
When I speak of plants and recommendations specific to our ecoregion, don’t feel that these don’t apply to you if you live, for instance, in the Pacific Northwest, or even Central Europe – Take the principles used to make those recommendations and apply them to your own setting, and I think you’ll be amazed and pleasantly surprised at the results!