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.
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.
My Wildscaping Symposium in Naturalistic Planting Design is now officially postponed.
Our new target date is fall 2022. Same place. Same time of year. A new sense of urgency to reconnect with our fellow humans and the natural world.
In the year of the virus almost no one saw coming, spring itself appears to be on hold.
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.
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.
