Naturalistic planting is nothing new, and I’m not going to reinvent the wheel with this article. Nevertheless, I find this topic inspiring and it’s a recurring theme in my day-to-day work: trying to understand better why some plants thrive in a specific location, why certain plants go well together, and how I can truly work with Nature.
One of my aims at work is to create gardens that are alive and thriving so that we can recreate the feel of paradise. In order to achieve this, you really need to know your plants and what they like. Also, to get the garden to progress and look great throughout the year, the system needs to work together like a symphony or a play.
I find it very important to know about the natural habitat of plants: this is key for knowing how they perform and their likes and dislikes. There aren’t that many popular books that talk about this, although I recently discovered ‘Perennials and their Garden Habitats’ by Richard Hansen
, and I will be writing small articles on this subject using my findings from this book and other sources.
I want these articles to be evidence for what I’ve learned beyond choosing plants only for their height, colour and time of flowering.
As a Spanish garden designer, I feel very encouraged to bring change to my country, especially when it comes to pockets of vegetation in public spaces, which are often filled with boring shrubs that are badly pruned and only make the commute or the casual walk around the city even more boring and uninspiring.
Plants themselves are powerful, so my aim is to bring knowledge and plants together. What we need to achieve are natural displays that showcase the full beauty that plants can offer.
And this can be very symbolic for the observer: humans are just another creation of God, and seeing plants flourish and grow is touching and invites us to reach for our own internal and external blossom and health. I’m being very intense right now, but that’s my personality! The inspiration that we can find in plant forms and plant patterns can greatly enrich our lives.
In gardens it’s important to find a balance between beauty that is static and beauty that changes and transforms. I will go deeper into this, but the smaller the scale, the more difficult this can be. How many gardeners allow plants to go through their full cycle? And how many of us are able to enjoy the beauty of plants when the flowers are gone?
Another interesting idea is that we use shrubs and trees predominantly in our cities and cityscapes, but perennials are adaptable to pretty much all conditions, and they could be used in places where trees and shrubs are just trying to survive but not thriving.
We need that mantle of green more than ever: we need to cover bare soil. And to achieve that, we need to learn how to plant our perennials not like flower arrangements in a bed, but in a way that brings out all their beauty.
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