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.
If my theme for 2018 is Plant, Places, and People, this post focuses on the people part of the equation.
And not just any people. In this case, I’m talking about the greater family of individuals for whom plants and their place in the universe are not only a profession or passion, but a way of life.
They might be landscape architects, planting designers, horticulturists, botanists, nurserymen, or professors. They might be focused on greening our public spaces or working in a more intimate private sphere.
In travel and gardens alike, I live for the unexpected. That mysterious bend in the path leading to a whole other something you could never imagine in advance.
Like a portal to another world.
My latest trip to Europe was filled with twists and turns in a month-long journey that skipped through seven different countries.
Well, I was definitely out there.
It took me over half a lifetime to return to the supersized environs of British Columbia. And while off exploring the massive old growth coastal forests of Tofino surrounding the westernmost edge of Vancouver Island, I couldn’t help but wonder aloud to the sky-capped cedars… What took me so long?
I was lured out to the West Coast by an invite to speak in Victoria as part of The Hardy Plant Study Weekend – a grand annual convergence of hort societies in the Pacific Northwest. The event is truly pan-American, rotating between Portland, Seattle, and Victoria – routinely selling out to a crowd of over 400 serious gardeners and plantophiles.
A new movement of native planting advocates is showing us how we can help sustain the matrix of biodiversity upon which all life depends – including our own.
To delve deeper, I spoke with Toronto ecological designer and former wild plant nursery owner Charles Kinsley to learn how urban gardeners can create and sustain a native garden.
