Mark VanTil knows a thing or two about gardening.

With more than 40 years experience and dozens of classes under his belt, the Berrien Springs resident adds new plants to his personal garden every year.

Although he spends most of his time these days organizing the Niles community gardens, he is still the man to talk to for advice on gardening tips and trends.

Here are his top trends in the world of horticulture:

• Saving water: With water becoming considered an expensive and limited resource, gardeners are looking for ways to conserve. One common way is xeriscaping, which involves removing grass from one’s yard and planting low maintenance perennials or putting in a rock or rain garden.

“This has been confirmed by seed sales. They have up significantly in the past year,” VanTil said.

Xeriscaping also allows for less pesticides and gas mowing, leading to less air and noise pollution.

• Feeding yourself: With the price of produce steadily increasing, people are beginning to grow their own fruits and vegetables either in their yard, a community garden or even large buckets.

“It has a lot to do with health and price,” VanTil said. “And everything tastes better.”

VanTil said some health experts argue that organically grown vegetables are healthier too.

“You are tending to the health of the soil and nutrients come from the soil,” he said. “If all the minerals are in the soil, you are going to get those vitamins and minerals coming up into your vegetables.”

• Small space gardening: Have a small back yard, no yard? No problem.

More homeowners with small amounts of land and even apartment dwellers are learning to tend plants and vegetables.

For small space gardening beginners, VanTil has some tips.

“First feed your soil,” he said. “Fix your soil organically with compost — grass clippings, leaves, everything organic can go in your compost pile.”

Like skyscrapers in big cities, VanTil suggests taking advantage of every bit of space by growing upwards when possible.

“Grow things vertically if you can. If you have a very small space, grow cucumber up the fence. Now you’ve used one-tenth the space,” he said.

Planting bushes is also a way to save space.

“If you are looking through a seed catalogue, try to go with things that say bush on it. With acorn squash, get the bush types. It takes up less space than the viney type,” VanTil said.

Other plants that produce heavily in small areas include beans, tomatoes and lettuce. Even apartment dwellers can get in on the action by growing the plants in large buckets.

“Lettuce can be grown very, very nicely in containers,” he said. “And you can cut it off and it grows right back.”

But it’s not just lettuce.

“I know a guy in Chicago who grows almost everything right in the city with a concrete backyard. He grows everything in 5-gallon buckets,” he said. “It’s a real growing trend.”

• Growing native plants: The theory is that indigenous plants require less water and fewer chemicals because they have survived in the area for millennia. But VanTil says he doesn’t shy away from foreign plant species.

“We’re truly a global community,” he said. “Now the seed companies have plants that we’ve never seen before. You can get bamboo and azaleas that are bred for winter.”

VanTil does caution gardeners to make sure they purchase plants that can grow in their zone. Most of southwest Michigan is in Zone 5b.