Flowers fade. Choose plants more for shape and texture than for their blooms. Stripped bare, stalks, stems, and seed pods become architectural elements in the garden. The secret: Embrace decay instead of rushing into the garden with your pruners at the first sign of wilting.

To create a four-season garden, start by planting perennials and grasses that thrive in your USDA Plant Hardiness Zone. The hardier the plant, the better it will withstand changes in weather. Avoid perennials that collapse into mush with the first hard frost.

After flowers fade, leave the plants in place instead of cutting them back. Sturdy stalks and dried seed pods will stand up to frost and snow, coated in white, will take on an ethereal otherworldliness.

By late winter, when stalks break off or start to look scraggly, sad, or deflated, cut back everything to the ground.

Mix grasses and flowering perennials.

Plant grasses in masses to create a soft, blurred background for other plants.

About 70 percent of a garden should be filled with structure plants; the other 30 percent can be filler.

Perennials fall into two categories: structure and filler plants. Structure plants provide visual interest (repeat bloomers, long-season perennials, and grasses) and filler plants offer flower or foliage color.

Repeating plants at regular intervals adds rhythm and variation.

A good matrix planting depends on background plants that are “visually quiet, with soft colors and without striking form” (Piet Oudolf). Grasses are an obvious choice; they can occupy the space for a long period of time, year-round perhaps, without having to be replaced.

Within the matrix, plant a few visual treats that will bloom in succession over the course of a year: a clump of irises to bloom in spring, perhaps, followed by poppies in summer and sedums in late summer and asters in autumn.

NPM gardeners find inspiration from natural landscapes, where plants occupy a limited number of physical layers within a community. For example, large trees are a layer, grasses another. Flowering perennials and low-growing plants form other layers.

Borrow landscape features such as a neighbor’s trees, nearby body of water, or a distant mountain and make them part of your garden by keeping plantings low and uniform. With that approach, the foreground can become a backdrop.

Create depth and a feeling of mystery with plants that intermingle. Avoid separate, distinct clumps of different kinds of plants and instead allow plants to self-sow among themselves.