About Tell the Bees
Gardens Designed for People and Pollinators
A landscape design practice built around the idea that a garden can support ecological life and matter to the people who live beside it.
Tell the Bees is a Waltham, Massachusetts–based landscape practice creating native, pollinator-supporting gardens for cemeteries, recovery and behavioral health settings, senior living communities, and homes. The work begins with the place itself—what belongs there, what life it can support, how people will use it, and what the landscape can become over time.
Founder & Designer
Scott Burnham
Tell the Bees was founded by landscape and ecological designer Scott Burnham. His work combines planting design, native plants, pollinator habitat, human experience, and the practical realities of maintaining landscapes over time.
Before founding Tell the Bees, Scott developed planting designs for more than 100 senior living communities across 34 states. That work required landscapes to function for residents, families, staff, maintenance crews, and the properties themselves—experience that continues to shape Tell the Bees today.
His approach is also informed by permaculture design and years of working with perennial planting, site conditions, seasonal structure, and the relationships between plants and the life around them.
The goal is not simply to make a garden look good. It is to create a place that belongs, supports life, and continues to offer something after installation day.
Experience That Grounds the Work
Tell the Bees combines ecological thinking with the practical experience required to make landscapes work in real places.
Planting Design
Years of experience designing perennial landscapes around scale, repetition, seasonal interest, circulation, architecture, maintenance, and long-term garden character.
Institutional Landscapes
Experience with senior living, recovery, cemetery, and other settings where visitor experience, daily operations, visibility, accessibility, and care all influence the design.
Ecological Relationships
Native and pollinator-supporting planting is used to create habitat, season-long floral resources, winter structure, and landscapes where ecological life remains visible.
What Shapes the Work
Place. Life. Experience.
Three questions guide a Tell the Bees garden.
01
Place
What belongs here? Light, soil, water, architecture, circulation, existing plants, maintenance, and the larger landscape all shape the answer.
02
Life
What relationships can the garden support? Native plants, bees, butterflies, birds, shelter, bloom succession, seed, structure, and seasonal change become part of the design.
03
Experience
What will it be like to live beside this garden? Where might someone sit, walk, notice, remember, talk, or simply spend a few minutes outside?
Why the Name
Why “Tell the Bees”?
For centuries, people in parts of Europe and North America observed a custom known as telling the bees. Important household news—births, marriages, deaths, departures, and other changes—was shared with the bees.
Tell the Bees does not recreate that custom as ceremony or requirement. The name carries forward something simpler: the recognition that human life and the living world do not have to remain separate from one another.
A garden gives that idea a physical place. Something can be noticed there, spoken there, remembered there—or nothing at all needs to happen. The garden still remains a garden.
Where Tell the Bees Works
The same principles take different forms depending on the people, place, and purpose of the landscape.
For Institutions
Cemeteries, recovery and behavioral health settings, and senior living communities where landscape can improve everyday use, visitor experience, ecological value, and visible stewardship.
For Home
Native and pollinator-supporting residential gardens designed around the place you live and the experience you want to have beside it.
Guides & Practice
Tell the Bees Guides and the wider practice extend ideas from the garden into plant choice, remembrance, seasonal attention, and our relationship with the living world.
Begin with the place.
Whether the project is an institutional landscape, a cemetery garden, a recovery garden, a senior living community, or a garden at home, the first step is understanding what is already there and what the landscape could do better.