Upon hearing that my New Perennial pond garden just won a 2020 Honour Award in Landscape Design, the highest such honour from the US-based Perennial Plant Association, I find myself lost for words.
I will instead let the garden speak for itself.
Results for Planting Design
Supernaturalistic: The New Perennial Pond Garden
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.
Future Nature: Reconnecting Plants and People
In my hiatus, I’ve taken the time to study up on some of the latest thinking in ecology and planting design. I’m excited to have found some great books and strong paths of convergence well worth sharing.
My first review is for a magnum opus, ‘Naturalistic Planting Design: The Essential Guide’ written by Nigel Dunnett from Sheffield University and published earlier this year on Filbert Press.
More than living up to its title, Dunnett presents an overarching vision to shift the still emerging discipline of planting design forward to the next phase in its evolution. Let’s crack it open and take a look.
Wildscaping: A Post-Earth Day Dream
Our perennial challenge is how to design plant-driven garden landscapes to express a wilder beauty while fulfilling ecological imperatives to spark biodiversity and feed the soul.
We want to dream big and be practical all at the same time.
To this end, I’ve captured and pulled together some of the more glowing threads from the hyperactive global conversation on how to plan, realize, and sustain designed landscapes in the public and private realm.
Closing Time: Goodbye to Hummelo
After nearly 40 years of welcoming the world through its gates, the private garden of Piet and Anja Oudolf at Hummelo will close to the public for good at the end of this month.
For all lovers of this most quintessential garden that galvanized an entire movement in naturalistic planting design, the news cuts deep.
Word of its closing has spread like wildfire-weed amongst garden folk and it’s inspired a kind of spontaneous pilgrimage of people visiting Kwekerij Oudolf one last time.