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Natural High

It’s early June in Southern Ontario and the flat strip of roof right outside my picture window has already launched into th­e first stage of a five-part micro-superbloom. The hyperreal colour palette of the multispecies sedum matrix shifts through the spectrum from an orange glimmer, acid yellow, shocking pink, silver-blue and garnet, and sometimes I think may be visible from space. And that’s just the opening act.

The next round of interlaced mosaic plantings are preparing for lift-off in a series of five tapered mounds that extend around the corners of the rectangular roof. Starting in midsummer, each mosaic opens like a chrysalis to form constellations of grasses, subshrubs, and perennials. It’s always a surprise to realize this is happening in only 10-15cm (4-6″) of recycled brick substrate and on top of a 200-year-old log cabin.

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Nigel Dunnett on Future Nature: Reconnecting Plants and People

Like many in the international horticulture and ecology community, I am not only sad but heartbroken by the recent passing of Dr. Nigel Dunnett. He was a genuine eco-visionary and exemplar who in collaboration with colleagues like Professor James Hitchmough at the University of Sheffield and Dr. Nöel Kingsbury, staked out new frontiers of possibility in our field with projects that took ecological planting to a higher plane of  creative expression.

This post is my homage to a humble genius gone far too soon, and an introduction to the man and his work with links to his essential writings and books.

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Tea spiller thriller: James Hitchmough on Native & Non-Native in garden ecology

Here’s a touchy topic guaranteed to spark debate in garden chats on both sides of the Atlantic.

Often with polarized positions taken by one side or another with zero room for compromise.

Or maybe, just maybe, there’s the beginning of a hairline crack, a fissure in the wall.

As recent guest on US podcast Growing Greener, Professor James Hitchmough ever so politely weighs in on the ecological benefits of using both native and non-native plants in urban environs.

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Future forward: Planting seeds of thought in public space

This is a conversation about what could be.

A conversation between two generations of exceptional Dutch landscape designers imagining what might happen next in the dynamic field of planting design. What lessons we can take from a multilayered private garden like Hummelo to bring to the public space and back again?

It’s well worth a listen. And a cinematic treat to watch.

Especially when one side of the conversation is the iconic maestro Piet Oudolf and the other side is Arjan Boekel, planting designer/LA on the rise. Here we follow them out for a morning walk and talk in the mist at Hummelo followed by a visit to Superbloei, a new urban collab project with Arjan of De Bloeimeesters and LOLA landscape architects in the nearby town of Arnhem.

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Wild-ish at Heart: Naturalistic Planting Design

It’s about setting aside our desire for control to instead work in partnership with nature. This is essentially the guiding principle behind the naturalistic garden, a plant-driven approach to landscape design that has been around in one form or another since Englishman William Robinson first published his first edition of The Wild Garden in 1870.

But now with signature projects like the High Line in New York City and Chicago’s Lurie Garden, a growing global movement in planting design has found a bolder, modernist expression of this ideal with a collective dream to re-wild our nature-deprived urban worlds.

It’s one thing to marvel at the High Line, with its ecstatic sweeps of perennials and grasses as envisioned by Dutch garden designer and plantsman Piet Oudolf, but for home gardeners, the question is, How can I bring something of this wild spirit back to my own urban garden reality?

I once wondered the very same thing. After years of experimenting in my own northern perennial garden and getting to know some of the plants and people leading the charge, I became seriously inspired to find a way.

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