The education of a gardener may take various forms and for me, more than schooling and internships, it is observing plants in the wild that has taught me the most – a statement as cliché as it is true. These days, as I am trying to tweak this hot-shot idea of meadow gardening to better suit our mild Pacific Northwest conditions, struggling to fit it to our tight urban lots and meet our high expectations, I realize that my most informative lessons were learned wandering the steppes of Mongolia, back in 2004. Here is a handful of photos dug from my own collection, each photo worth a thousand words.