Over the past few years, I’ve been too busy making new gardens to actually find the time to write about them. We’re only now at a point where I can sit down to share something of the bigger picture.
The unspoken reality is we’ve been immersed in making a series of garden spaces from scratch, diverse in both scale and habitat, but all linked by this idea of wildscaping. Up till now, only friends and visitors have seen fragments of the work in progress.
At its roots, the New Perennial movement in naturalistic planting design is about making gardens in symbiosis with nature. It calls for a wilder aesthetic, attuned to ecology, and informed by horticulture.
Inspired by naturally occurring habitats, such plantings are designed landscapes composed of a series of interwoven plant layers together forming a community, abstracting the patterns and rhythms found in nature.
There are no rules, only guidelines for the home gardener: Reduce garden inputs, recycle garden outputs; design with biodiversity & maintenance in mind; group plants by common habitat; work with the conditions you got; invite spontaneity; use plants as a living mulch to cover ground; come fall, leave plants to stand and amend in their own debris; above all, experimentation is the key to learning.
I pursed my lips in quiet victory. At the ungodly hour of 5:30 a.m. on a Friday morning in April, my trowel and I glided through U.S. Customs to dig into my New Perennial opportunity of the year: a chance to help plant out a Piet Oudolf-designed botanic garden in Delaware.
One week later standing in his future meadow, I had the chance to ask Piet Oudolf himself that most basic of questions: “So Piet, how do you like to plant?”
It’s about setting aside our desire for control to instead work in partnership with nature. This is essentially the guiding principle behind the naturalistic garden, a plant-driven approach to landscape design that has been around in one form or another since Englishman William Robinson first published his first edition of The Wild Garden in 1870.
But now with signature projects like the High Line in New York City and Chicago’s Lurie Garden, a growing global movement in planting design has found a bolder, modernist expression of this ideal with a collective dream to re-wild our nature-deprived urban worlds.
It feels like forever since I’ve been able to post photos of an actual garden of my own.
There’s been ceaseless rain in a cool extended spring, helping my young woodland garden find its feet. I’ve been planting up adjoining areas and getting busy with my Dutch hoe while watching this section burst to life.
