“Sucking is the first step to being sorta good at something.”

“Sucking is the first step to being sorta good at something.” 

My border in early July

I love this quote from reddit founder Alexis Ohanian because it reminds me of a thought that almost never leaves my head: I suck at planting. Of course, there are times when I don’t—glorious moments when a planting rewards me with a spectacle more fabulous than anything I imagined. But those ultimately fade and I am left with new shortcomings to address next season.

I remember thinking early in my career that I would look forward to the day when everything wasn't an experiment.  But the truth is everything is still an experiment. It always is. I practice, write, teach, and basically never stop thinking about planting design. Have I mastered my craft? Absolutely not.

In many ways, one never masters this craft. Planting design—particularly the naturalistic strain of it—is like playing chess against a computer (“nature” being the computer in this case). It is a perverse game: nature constantly outwits all attempts at control, ridicules all plans, and even when things are going well—even when it seems like we've finally got the upper hand—it taps us on the shoulder and reminds us that the second we stop gardening, all of our efforts will be swept away. Ours is an ephemeral art. 

Control: Cloud-pruned box for a median I designed with my firm RHI

To assert control, one could use formal gestures: clipped hedges, large blocks of single species, plants that rarely change though the year.  These are entirely effective. While I am ultimately interested in the idea of naturalism—that is, a style of planting more closely aligned with the way plants evolved in nature—my goal is to create effects with plants. So I will use every tool in the toolkit.

But even with plantings we can control, we still lose. And here’s the thing: sometimes losing is the best part. All gardeners know this. Some of the best moments in our plantings are not really ours, but a moment of self-seeded spontaneity, combinations we did not really anticipate, or the dull, overused plants that we’d almost ripped out only to discover they had become the anchors of our gardens.

So dear readers, I wish you many, many failures. I wish you grandiose plans that fizzle into hair-pulling messes, bold gestures that melt into formless puddles, and spectacular fireworks that fail to ignite. I wish you fail often and fail fast. Because out of this comes courage. And out of courage comes good design.

Garden Designer's Roundtable: Memory and Plants

NOSTALGIA: The idea that a plant or group of plants can evoke certain emotions based upon an evolved memory of the landscapes they are associated.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about our emotional experience of landscapes.  Why do some landscapes make me feel relaxed and contemplative, while others make me nervous or uncomfortable?  Landscape architects, designers, and gardeners have long explored the aesthetic experience of landscapes, but rarely the emotional experience.

I was delighted that the Garden Designer’s Roundtable topic for the month is “Memory and Plants.”  It is the perfect excuse for dwelling a bit more deeply on a concept I’ve articulated before, but only partially.  I want to write about “nostalgia,” a word I’ve used to describe our emotional reaction to planting design. 

Why does this matter?  For me, understanding our emotional connection to plants and landscapes holds tremendous potential for all those who design or garden.  First, it pushes landscape design past the endless (and tiresome) pendulum swing of geometric vs. naturalistic (or formal vs. informal) design.  This fundamentally formalistic concern has distracted us from exploring the full potential of landscape as a dynamic art form.  Second, it offers designers a framework for understanding how to create emotional experiences within gardens and landscapes.

Plants, Memory, and Emotion

We are all likely to have very personal and subjective reactions to specific plants.  The scent of orange blossoms remind me of a winter afternoon I spent in a Dumbarton Oaks conservatory; Southern Magnolias remind me of a giant tree on my grandmother’s property I played in as a child.  These personal memories are poignant connections to plants, people, and places; but these subjective responses are not what I’m interested in here.

Garden Designers Roundtable: Texture in the Landscape--A Musical Analogy

I’ve been thinking about texture lately.  Texture is one of those generic garden topics like “color” that every garden book dedicates an obligatory chapter.   Photos of hostas, ferns, and other foliage plants often follow.  Despite the rather clichéd use of the word in garden literature, the idea of texture in the landscape does not seem fully explored.  So to better understand what texture might mean in landscape sense, I turn to music. 

According to one source, texture in music means “a structure of interwoven fibers.”  In music, texture refers to the way multiple voices (or instruments) interact in a composition.  Texture in music is a way of understanding hierarchy.  Which voice is prominent?  Are they all equal?  How do they combine to create the whole?  Already my mind was spinning about materials in a landscape.  Texture is not just about a type of plant (i.e. big leaf foliage plants), but about the way materials or plants work together to create effects.  That got me thinking: how do we combine materials for artistic effect? 

Music theory describes four types of texture in music: monophonic, polyphonic, homophonic, and heterophonic.  Now before you glaze over, each of these concepts has some rather fascinating ways of understanding texture in a landscape setting.  Consider these visual analogies:

Why We Plant.

Garden design magazines and blogs dedicate a lot of space to answering the questions "how" and "what" to plant.  But in the last few weeks, I've become rather fascinated with the question: why do we design with plants?  In many ways, planting design is one of the most frivolous, silly activities I can think of. That’s not to say it doesn’t matter. But it is certainly not necessary, like paychecks or vaccines or heart surgery. It is a pure extravagance, something we do for our own pleasure.

We can survive without gardens, yes, but the question is, can we live without them? What I love about plants, in particular, is their ability to reveal the invisible world. The way a grass moves in the wind, or the way a seedhead glows when backlit by the setting sun. The goal of great planting design is not simply to arrange pretty plants in pretty patterns. When garden design becomes another form of interior decorating, it loses its soul. No, what interests me is creating landscapes that are more alive than we are, but in a completely different way. When we enter into a landscape brimming with life and let that life enter into us, let it move through us, then we get a glimpse of the horizon we were created for.

Beyond the Border 4: Maintaining Perennials to Last

This is the final post in a series I’ve been doing on how to design perennials and grasses in landscape settings. By landscape settings, I’m referring to non-garden sites, including public parks, commercial and institutional landscapes, or even residential sites larger than a single bed. Throughout this series, I’ve made the claim that herbaceous plants—the most dynamic and expressive plants a designer can use—ought to be used more often in our built landscapes.

My last post talked about how to select plants for these low maintenance sites. This post will focus on the single greatest reason people avoid using perennials and grasses: uncertainty about how they should be maintained. Almost every time I suggest using herbaceous plants in landscape settings, here’s what I hear: perennial plantings are fussy and high maintenance; clients don’t understand them and won’t take care of them; in a year from now, it will all be a weedy mess; use more shrubs or lawn.

It kills me. Some days I wonder if I will spend half my career battling the tyranny of low expectations.

The reason it kills me is because I know from experience how low maintenance perennials and grasses can actually be once established. I know that clients can have a lasting, beautiful, and sustainable planting in a fraction of the time it takes to maintain a lawn.

To understand how to maintain perennials and grasses, one must first understand a few basic concepts:

Beyond the Border Part 3: How to Select Plants for Landscape Settings

This is the third post in a series I’m doing on perennials and grasses in the larger landscape. I’ve made the claim that perennials and grasses—possibly the most dynamic and interesting plants a designer can use—ought to be used more often in our built landscapes. Imagine our public landscapes, yards, and office parks cloaked in a rich tapestry of sustainable and beautiful perennials and grasses inspired by the patterns and palettes of our native vegetation.

My last post talked about a compositional strategy of massing plants in order to reduce their maintenance and increase their legibility. This post will focus on the second strategy: how to choose the right plants. Plant selection is absolutely critical to the long term success of a planting, and to be honest, it’s not easy. Here are some general strategies that can help.

What Plants Do I Choose?

Choosing the right plant for the right spot is hard enough. With every site, there is a dizzying list of cultural requirements (exposure, slope, soil, climate) that one must consider. In a larger landscape setting, there are additional design factors to consider.

1. Filler Plants to Create Volume

Aster oblongifolius creates volume against a drive.
Design by Ching-Fang Chen

Large perennial and grass beds are most attractive when they create volume against a void, such as a lawn, path, or street. Let me share a secret with you. Great perennial planting in landscape settings is not about perfectly balanced flower colors—though color matters. It’s not really about creating great photogenic combinations—though combinations add style to a composition. Half the battle in creating herbaceous plantings that endure is to simply cover the ground at a relatively uniform height. If you can find perennials and grasses that thickly carpet the ground and range in height from 12-42 inches, you're halfway there.

In his books and interviews, Piet Oudolf talks much about the distinction between structural and filler plants. This distinction is key to his compositions. A structural plant is one whose form is distinctive and architectural, whereas a filler plant has a more amorphous, cloud-like form. Consider the strongly structural flowers of an Echinacea or an Echinops. In a composition, the eye will fall onto these distinct forms. These plants also tend to dry into distinctive seed heads in the fall and winter, creating enduring interest through the year. Filler plants include most ornamental grasses (Switchgrass) and many mounding perennials (Asteromea mongolica). Oudolf recommends using a ratio that heavily emphasizes structural plants to filler plants, around 70/30, mostly to make sure the composition has strong form throughout the year.

My advice is to reverse that ratio. Of course, Oudolf’s work is undeniably beautiful and masterful. But I have two problems with using that many structural plants in landscape settings. First, structural plants tend not to cover the ground as well as filler plants. So when they’re not maintained well, it creates gaps where weeds can fill in. Second, since structural plants are more about a distinctive profile of a flower or leaf, they tend to have shorter bursts of interest. Yes, they look great in winter, but there are moments in early spring, for example, when they’re wiry or just not as full.

Beyond the Border: How to Use Perennials and Grasses in Landscape Settings

Of all the plants I frequently obsess about, herbaceous perennials and grasses are perhaps my favorite.  Of all the plant categories, they are the most ephemeral, dynamic plants.  One can mark the seasons with these plants; they are harbingers of change.   And as a designer, perennials and grasses are the most expressive plants within my palette.  Rich layers of bold perennial massings can express a site in powerful ways. 

The British border

When it comes to designing with perennials and grasses, however, we have a limited language for their use.  The perennial border—an intricately arranged, delicate frame of flowers—is really the only concept we have for their use.  And while borders can be beautiful, they have limitations.  They are generally high maintenance, fussy, and require a high degree of horticultural knowledge.  As a result, American gardeners and landscapers are often hesitant to use perennials and grasses because we associate them with British-styled borders.  But it does not have to be this way.

Let me propose an alternative.  Instead of limiting our landscapes to two distinctly British genres (the manor lawn and the perennial border), let us take the border and explode it out of its box.  Let’s blanket our landscapes in bold massings of perennials and grasses.  Let’s convert our wall-to-wall carpeting lawns into well-proportioned area rugs surrounded by perennials and grasses.  Let’s drape office parks and civic landscapes in vibrant tapestries of flowers, ferns, and sedges.