Subscribe to The New Perennialist

×

Results for Planting Design

Designing with Randomness: A Masterclass in Planting Design

It’s a wrap. And yes, there is a recording!

On Saturday, The New Perennialist Talks presented a masterclass on the leading-edge with James Hitchmough, Professor Emeritus of University of Sheffield, a genius innovator and iconoclast in modern planting design.

The 90-minute plus session on Designing with Randomness more than lived up to the masterclass title.  A gifted communicator, James rolled out a crystal clear framework for how to plan, create and manage spectacular nature-like plantings for optimal wow factor and ecological value.

Working with a combination of sowing specific seed mixes and planting, he has cultivated the ability to achieve stunning and reliable results simply not possible with one method alone.

Continue reading

Piet Oudolf At Work: A Conversation

Right from its plain brown-wrap cover, the new book ‘Piet Oudolf At Work’ strikes a different chord in how it chooses to show and tell its story.

Oudolf has always been a visual thinker and his creative process is both far more abstract, complex and subtle than can easily be described in words. So instead of verbiage, At Work visually walks us through each phase of the design process, as the landscapes he envisions in his mind make the creative leap to colour-coded plans on paper.

This is his first book to delve into such depth, openly sharing plans from nearly 30 projects in the largest collection of his drawings ever published.

Continue reading

The Wildscaping Talk: Explorations in Naturalistic Planting Design

I’m ecstatic to present my latest talk focused on the wilder frontiers of designed landscapes.

We delivered the talk live to an international audience of gardeners and designers in early April. If you missed it, no worries. You can now watch the recording as a Video-on-Demand on Vimeo simply by clicking this link.

I’ve been evolving and delivering versions of this talk to garden lovers over the past two years – and getting rave reviews along the way. It’s an opportunity to share my inside perspective on some of the international designers, gardens and innovations leading this growing movement. I pair this up with a look at my own experimental design projects at my cabin here in Canada.

Continue reading

The New Perennialist 2.0 Redesigned to Feed your Mind

Welcome back to the very new New Perennialist.

I’m thrilled to unveil the latest version of this blog, freshly redesigned over Summer 2021 to gear up for the next round of explorations in naturalistic planting design.

The awe-inspiring drone shot of the new Piet Oudolf-designed garden at the Vitra Campus in Weil am Rhein, Germany helps to set the tone.

What started out as a blog based on my outsider’s fascination with naturalistic planting design has grown over the course of nearly ten years into a useful archive of original content. I’ve been truly gratified by how it’s come to be enjoyed as a resource by like-minded garden friends from around the world.

Continue reading

Wildscaping: The Home Edition

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.

Continue reading