Current trends in planting and design

 

 

This was the title of the Gardens Illustrated lecture held yesterday at the Royal Geographical Society.  Jointly steered by Tim Richardson, garden historian and writer, and Noel Kingsbury, researcher and writer, the discussion between three well-known designers pointed out some of the directions that garden planting and design is taking.

The designers, Andy Sturgeon, Dan Pearson and Cleve West - officially up there with the big boys now, thanks to his ‘best in show ‘ garden at Chelsea this week – had interesting things to say about both their own practice and the future development of design, although it seemed to me that a number of points were left unaddressed.



In one sense the debate turned on the tension between ‘Modernism’ and ‘traditional’ gardening styles.  Part of the trouble in this debate is that the term ‘Modernism’ refers to a distinct artistic movement, with political and social dimensions, that emerged in Europe after the First World War and held sway for a quarter century and more, evolving as it travelled across the planet and finding its spiritual home in interwar Germany at the Bauhaus school and in the United States.  We all think we know ‘Modernism’ – but we use the term as shorthand in relation to any pared-down building, garden, painting or sculpture, and this is often an inaccurate way to describe what we see.  I think we need to seek a new term to identify our current creative trends  - ‘contemporary’ is insufficient.  But this is an aside – what of gardens?



Andy Sturgeon has written that the conflation of Modernist and Arts and Crafts styles in gardens is a ‘very
British fudge’ – he’s right.  In a way most current ‘Modern’ designs of strong ground plans, asymmetrical and using up-to-date versions of old materials (sawn, honed and polished stone rather than riven slabs) still have at their heart the Arts and Crafts style – loose, romantic planting set within a strong frame.  The plant choices have changed over the years with the tides of fashion, but the great traditions of planting that have rendered the British style desirable across the world still hold sway.  We love our plants – the variety, the colour, the succession through the year.  Creating plantings which look good at any season, that combine wonderfully harmonising or clashing colour combinations with scent and structure is, as Tim Richardson reminded the audience, our greatest native vernacular art form.  The French have food, we have gardens.  For many, this fudge is an acceptable one – you can have a wide variety of plants and a funky terrace all in the same space, and call it ‘contemporary’ -  but what comes next?  If we are to identify
and define a new style, what will it look like – and what will it be called?



The big developments are taking place outside the UK, it seems – the speakers referred to Eastern Europe
and Germany as areas where exploration into new planting styles are furthest advanced.  These developments hinge on the the naturalism of wild plant communities, and this naturalism is something we are also exploring in the UK.  Through research into plant communities such as meadows, steppes and prairies, there have crept into our planting palette over the past 20 years the echinaceas, rudbeckias, grasses, eupatoriums and countless other varieties.  Wilder-looking than traditional garden plants (although, of course, hybridisation and selections mean that we are seeing increasing numbers of cultivars that are shorter, more floriferous, more brightly-coloured and more ‘garden-worthy’) these plants have been used widely in less formal plantings in the UK and beyond. 


The New Perennial style, prairie plantings and drift planting all use this type of plant material, but such
gardens need to be created on a large scale in order to succeed fully.  Meadows and ‘pictorial meadows’ are now equally engineered, and while we call them ‘naturalistic’ they are in no way natural – they are gardens, and as such are as much an artifice as a rose garden underplanted with catmint.  The fact that they emulate nature helps us to view them as ‘wild’, but in reality I think that they are emblematic of our current uneasy relationship with the natural world.


While news regarding the environment is continually gloomy – climate change, deforestation and biodiversity issues continue to worsen it seems, no matter how much we say we want to make amends – we appear to be seeking a way of both salving our consciences as well as creating little bits of nature to return to from the pressures of the modern world.  That is what gardens have always been, of course, but the yearning to have a patch of ground that looks as though it could be a piece of unimproved nature seems to
be getting stronger.  Seed mixes for meadows can be tweaked for their aesthetic value, and while they may help to improve biodiversity, a similar effect can be created in most traditional gardens by letting the lawn grow a bit weedy and leaving flowering stems to stand through the winter.


Don’t get me wrong – I love the new styles of naturalistic meadows and prairies, engineered plant communities and green roofs – I just don’t think we should fool ourselves that we are making anything less artificial than a traditional garden.  The biggest benefits come from the maintenance regimes we adopt, and these can become wildlife-friendly no matter what our preferred style of gardening.  The danger of ‘going wild’ is that, in small spaces, any sense of underlying structure is lost, and gardens lack focus.  On an appropriately large scale there is still scope for areas of naturalistic planting within an established layout.


Dan Pearson reflected yesterday that he hopes, in large areas of his new garden, to allow nature to have the upper hand – by careful editing, restrained addition and sympathetic management he aims to create his garden from what is there, on the ground.  Perhaps this is as close as we will get to a truly naturalistic garden  – but it will still be a garden.

 

(Apologies for the lack of images - blog editing tool won't letme upload them at present - photos to follow)

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Comments

  • Hi Paul

     Very interesting post, thank you.

     Question is I guess, do Designers lead the trends, or do Joe or Joanne Public? 

    From our sales last month, 90% were to Joe and Joanne through sales to Garden Centres, plants across the board for their gardens shrubs, Grasses, Herbaceous, etc, etc. even Trees!!! 

     10% of sales were to Landscapers and Garden Designers.

     So who sets the trends, and determines future demand and plant production?

     After 30+ years in the trade as a Grower, I always sell more of what I like, as I can rave about plants that I grow and love, and sell on the back of that.  Plants that I am not keen on, and just grow to make up the numbers, I sell less of, always have.

     I dislike the trend for the use of just Herbaceous in gardens, as it requires little planning or Garden Design.  Yes looks great in Summer, but is a pile of dead sticks in Winter?  What ever happened to 70% Shrubs for year round structure and 30% Herbaceous?  50/50 would at least give the client something of interest through the Autumn and Winter.

     Is it a lack of plant knowledge leading this?

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Interesting point - one of the issues raised yesterday was the narrow range of shrubs now available to gardeners, due to the fashion for herbaceous plants which have pushed them out of public awareness.  The feeling was that we have to return to a proportion of shrubby materials in our designs and gardens to retain structure as well as have dependably long-lived material - without shrubs the intentions of the designer, whether that is a professional or the garden owner, will only last as long as the shortest-lived plant...

    It sounds as though you will be ahead of the curve if you start expanding your shrub list!

     

  • PRO
    We seem to have come full circle to the ideas first espoused by William Robinson. I agree that all herbaceous lacks winter structure but if you choose plants that have interesting seed heads, berries etc. and resist the urge to be too tidy-minded, the winter garden can still be attractive. Looking at Chelsea this year, there seems to have been a move away from architectural planting to a much softer, naturalistic style but most of the planting schemes would be difficult to achieve for the average gardener...if they are anything like me they will end up with billowing drifts of horsetail, creeping buttercup and any other 'wildflower' that can easily out-compete the pretty perennials that should be thriving.
  • Interesting.  Our gardens are becoming more and more important to the survival of so many species. I can but hope that what seems an obsession with perceived low maintenance options at the expense of plants is something that will change with all the coverage we are seeing in newspapers/internet recently..

    I have written an article for a local magazine and one of the things I have asked for people to consider is to allow the lawn to grow just a little longer. Bees are feeding on the clover on our lawn as we speak.

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