Planting: A New Perspective - Hardcover

Piet Oudolf’s gardens are breathtaking to observe and hard to define. They are calm yet full of surprises, apparently effortless but complex to achieve, and intimate while reaching out to the wider natural world.  His unique combinations of long-lived perennials and woody plants are rich in texture, sophisticated in colour, and have an emotional resonance that humans find compelling.
 
Oudolf’s skill in combining plants is legendary and in his recent work he takes it to a new level, favouring highly integrated schemes in which plants intermingle and blend without overcrowding one another. An intimate knowledge of plants is essential to the success of this approach and here, Piet Oudolf and Noel Kingsbury share their considerable understanding of plant ecology and performance – how plants behave in different situations, what goes on underground, which species make good neighbours. From them we learn how to select the right plants, how to group them, and how to combine them with other elements to make beautiful gardens that require minimal use of resources.
 
With the help of Oudolf’s original planting plans, this book is the first to show gardeners and professionals explicitly how his gardens and landscapes are made. A detailed directory that records vital information about each plant such as its life expectancy, the persistence of its seedheads, its tendency to spread, and propensity to self seed will prove an invaluable resource.
 
A Piet Oudolf garden feels right on many different levels ­­and is so much more than the sum of its parts. This book will be essential reading for all who are interested in making plant-rich gardens that are in tune with their surroundings, support biodiversity, and nourish the human spirit.
 

The agenda for planting design in the twenty-first century
The former nursery at Piet and Anja Oudolf’s at Hummelo in the Netherlands. It is now a boldly experimental area where a range of robust perennials grow amidst a sown mix of wild pasture grasses along with various spontaneously arriving species. Only time will tell how it will work out.

Plants are increasingly being recognized as a vital part of our urban and domestic environments, not just a luxury or an unnecessary—if pleasant—bit of decoration. It has long been established, for example, that the mere view of plants through a window has a beneficial effect on the human psyche, and that plants can play an important role in cleaning and purifying the air of buildings and built-up environments.

Gardening, whether on the most intimate private level or the most extensive and public, involves an appreciation of and involvement with the natural world. For many people, plants may be their only point of contact with nature apart from feeling the effects of the weather. Private gardens offer the opportunity for personal choices to be made about what plants to grow and how to manage them, while designers of civic landscapes have always had the responsibility of serving the wider public interest. There is, however, a new and additional agenda for gardeners, both private and public: sustainability and the support of biodiversity. Sustainability demands that we minimize irreplaceable inputs in gardening and reduce harmful outputs, while the support of biodiversity brings a demand for wildlife-friendly planting and practices.

The use of long-lived perennials in conjunction with woody plants—the approach Piet Oudolf and I have always supported—genuinely offers improved sustainability and support for biodiversity. Reducing the amount of regularly mown lawn and the unnecessary trimming of woody plants for unclear motives is surely a step forward. Creating rich garden habitats offers natural beauty close at hand, provides resources and homes for wildlife, and improves the sustainability of management.

Deciding what plants to use and how to arrange them is covered by the field of planting design, which brings together a combination of technical knowledge and artistic vision. This book looks at some of the recent trends within planting design, and is aimed primarily at home gardeners, garden design and maintenance professionals, and landscape architects. There are, however, important lessons for others, such as architects, who do not use plants directly but often have to situate their work in close proximity to them, or ecologists, whose profession does not involve much design but who increasingly have a role to play in the creation and management of designed plantings.

While the role of plants—and therefore planting design—is well established in the domestic garden, and is indeed absolutely crucial to its aesthetic and functional success, it has not been so well established in landscape design. Or perhaps more accurately, plants have often played a minor role in urban landscape design. Historically, for centuries the only plants used in cities were avenue trees; the nineteenth century saw the growth of urban parks, the late twentieth a much wider use of plants in urban areas—a practice to a large extent pioneered in the Netherlands. Now, however, the use of plants is increasing, particularly that of perennials and ornamental grasses, requiring greater access to technical information about plant establishment and management, and to ideas about the visual aspects of their use. Before I discuss in more detail what this book is about, it is perhaps worth looking at these new trends.