The secret of great planting revealed.
Of all my various rants, one point I am consistent: planting design is an art. Planting design needs to be liberated from its traditional role as ornamentation to architecture. For too long, the role of the American planting designer has been to ‘shrub up’ the base of buildings, like placing parsley around a pot roast. Instead, planting can be an expressive and dynamic medium in itself, capable of conveying meaning and emotion.
If you’re reading this blog, you are obviously highly intelligent and artful (wink) and believe that garden design is an art. So dear readers, here is my question for you: is your planting evocative or provocative?
Here’s what I mean. I’ve been mulling over great planting design. Not just good planting, but the icons of great planting: Getrude Jekyll’s borders, Jens Jenson’s prairie-inspired landscapes, Roberto Burle Marx’s cubist ground-planes, Christopher Lloyd’s border at Great Dixter, Beth Chatto’s gardens, Piet Oudolf’s perennial landscapes, Tom Stuart-Smith’s cutting edge designs. Each designer is incredibly different, but what they all have in common is an ability to manipulate human’s associations with natural landscapes.
 |
| Evocative planting design: Beth Chatto's gravel garden. Courtesy of BBC. |
