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.
I pursed my lips in quiet victory. At the ungodly hour of 5:30 a.m. on a Friday morning in April, my trowel and I glided through U.S. Customs to dig into my New Perennial opportunity of the year: a chance to help plant out a Piet Oudolf-designed botanic garden in Delaware.
One week later standing in his future meadow, I had the chance to ask Piet Oudolf himself that most basic of questions: “So Piet, how do you like to plant?”
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 feels like forever since I’ve been able to post photos of an actual garden of my own.
There’s been ceaseless rain in a cool extended spring, helping my young woodland garden find its feet. I’ve been planting up adjoining areas and getting busy with my Dutch hoe while watching this section burst to life.
It’s that special time when newspaper columnists and writers like to stir the pot with predictions of ‘What’s Hot & What’s Not’ for the coming year.
While they compile such trend lists for the world of gardening, I rarely pay attention because making a garden is really more of a long-term affair.
Coming into 2017 though, I’ve noticed a definite trend in the ether: A few garden writers have surprisingly declared that the New Perennial trend of naturalistic gardening along with its trademark use of ornamental grasses, is on its way out.
Are they right? Or are they wrong?
