Enter Sandman: The High Diversity Plantings of Peter Korn

Our talk on April 23rd turned out to be a trip to the beach. Because the near mythical Swedish plantsman and designer Peter Korn talked about pioneering a new way of creating wildly inspired climate-tough gardens and he’s doing it all with sand.

You can now watch a full recording of High Diversity Plantings in the archive of The New Perennialist Talks page.

The gardens of Peter Korn are like no other – bursting with a hyper-concentration of esoteric plant species with non-stop flowering from spring till fall. Every plant is neatly fitted to its ecological niche and microhabitat within the greater scheme. From his base at Klinta Trädgård near Malmö, Peter is setting convention on its head with gardens that defy usual practices. They’re tough, beautiful, and pure catmint for plant lovers.

Peter revealed the thinking and inspiration behind his unique approach with a guided tour through his latest gardenscapes, nursery, living walls, parks, green roof, gravel and crevice gardens.

The deep dive on Peter Korn

Peter Korn is a wildly innovative Swedish plantsman and garden designer really, really loves plants and relishes a challenge even more. Perhaps that’s what inspired him to learn from wild places how to grow plants in the most extreme conditions. Peter is largely self-taught guided by over nearly 20 years of experimentation at his self-made five-acre botanic garden in Eskilsby.

Since 2014, he has worked tirelessly on a string of naturalistic design projects in Sweden, Denmark, Russia and France creating everything from public parks to green walls, and roof gardens. Peter and his partner Julia Andersson are now based at Klinta Trädgård near Malmö where they have built a visionary sequence of gardens as well as a specialized plant nursery for his projects.

Peter and Julia are also the founders and organizers of the Urban Growth Conference, which they now plan to move a year forward to Fall 2023. Learn more about Peter’s visionary approach to planting design in his book Giving plants what they want, available directly from Peter via his email.

You can read about my adventures in Sweden at the first conference here. It was a phenomenal event with a stellar line-up of speakers followed by nocturnal explorations with fellow plant-phreaks in the historic town of Lund. Maybe the best conference I’ve ever attended – best in Sweden, for sure!

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