Here’s a touchy topic guaranteed to spark debate in garden chats on both sides of the Atlantic.
Often with polarized positions taken by one side or another with zero room for compromise.
Or maybe, just maybe, there’s the beginning of a hairline crack, a fissure in the wall.
As recent guest on US podcast Growing Greener, Professor James Hitchmough ever so politely weighs in on the ecological benefits of using both native and non-native plants in urban environs.
This is a conversation about what could be.
A conversation between two generations of exceptional Dutch landscape designers imagining what might happen next in the dynamic field of planting design. What lessons we can take from a multilayered private garden like Hummelo to bring to the public space and back again?
It’s well worth a listen. And a cinematic treat to watch.
Especially when one side of the conversation is the iconic maestro Piet Oudolf and the other side is Arjan Boekel, planting designer/LA on the rise. Here we follow them out for a morning walk and talk in the mist at Hummelo followed by a visit to Superbloei, a new urban collab project with Arjan of De Bloeimeesters and LOLA landscape architects in the nearby town of Arnhem.
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’s one thing to marvel at the High Line, with its ecstatic sweeps of perennials and grasses as envisioned by Dutch garden designer and plantsman Piet Oudolf, but for home gardeners, the question is, How can I bring something of this wild spirit back to my own urban garden reality?
I once wondered the very same thing. After years of experimenting in my own northern perennial garden and getting to know some of the plants and people leading the charge, I became seriously inspired to find a way.
When one of the world’s leading photographers of hyper-beautiful gardens decides that beauty is no longer enough, it captures your attention.
In this most recent Talk, we heard first hand from Australian photographer Claire Takacs about her epic two-year journey to explore and document 80 of the most innovative garden landscapes from around the world.
For this trip, her focus shifted to projects that dare to take on the bigger questions about sustainability, pollution, biodiversity, and urbanization, all in the face of climate change. The solutions found and realized are astounding. And in many cases, beautiful in a whole other way.
Claire collaborated with multi-talented Italian landscape architect and writer Giacomo Guzzon to create a monumental book based on these travels:– Visionary: Gardens and Landscapes for Our Future.
It’s a wrap.
You can now catch our most popular and highly requested talk of 2024 on Vimeo.
This is a high-level introduction to the leading-edge of planting design with James Hitchmough, Professor Emeritus of University of Sheffield, a genius innovator and iconoclast in horticultural ecology.
This 90-minute plus session on Designing with Randomness more than lives up to the masterclass title. A gifted communicator, James rolls out a crystal clear framework for how to plan, create and manage spectacular nature-like plantings for optimal wow factor and ecological value.
