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Results for Ecology

Designing with Randomness: A Masterclass in Planting Design

It’s a wrap. And yes, there is a recording!

The New Perennialist Talks presents a masterclass on the far points of the leading-edge with James Hitchmough, Professor Emeritus of University of Sheffield, a genius innovator and iconoclast in modern planting design.

The 90-minute plus session on Designing with Randomness more than lives up to the masterclass title.  A gifted communicator, James rolls out a crystal clear framework for how to plan, create and manage spectacular nature-like plantings for optimal wow factor and ecological value.

Working with a combination of sowing specific seed mixes and planting, he has cultivated the ability to achieve stunning and reliable results simply not possible with one method alone.

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Trees for the Future

The best time to plant a tree will be right after you watch this talk.

Catch up on the latest thinking in tree selection for climate resilience, carbon storage, boosting biodiversity, and other essential ecosystem benefits. Not to mention for the life-giving beauty, scale and character that trees bring to our gardens and landscapes – but only if we plant the right tree in the right place.

My special guests are international tree expert Henrik Sjöman from Sweden and Arit Anderson, UK garden designer, passionate advocate for the environment and presenter on BBC Gardeners’ World. And they are here to help us think very big indeed.

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Let’s Build Wildlife Habitat into Everyday Places Everywhere

Where others see trash in an industrial wasteland, John Little sees the raw materials to create startlingly effective ecological habitat.

For 25 years now, this English innovator has worked to recycle, reclaim and repurpose the stuff we throw away into artful ecological structures.

He takes a mix of crushed highway rubble, rusted out old cars, smashed bathroom tiles together with handfuls of wildflower seeds, and rejigs all the broken pieces to fit just about any niche in the urban jungle. Everything from green roofs and habitat walls to bus shelters and buzzy meadow landscapes.

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Wildscape Update: New Talks

When I first posted my idea for Wildscaping here in spring 2019, it was with the secret hope that both the word and its spirit might take on a life of its own.

Like a message in a digital bottle.

We all know what happened next. Driven by the pandemic lockdowns, we experienced a seismic cultural shift to suddenly embrace all things plants, gardens, and matters of biodiversity in ways no-one could have ever predicted or imagined.

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Wildscaping: The Home Edition

Over the past few years, I’ve been too busy making new gardens to actually find the time to write about them. We’re only now at a point where I can sit down to share something of the bigger picture.

The unspoken reality is we’ve been immersed in making a series of garden spaces from scratch, diverse in both scale and habitat, but all linked by this idea of wildscaping. Up till now, only friends and visitors have seen fragments of the work in progress.

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