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Results for Practices + Methods

Designing with Randomness: A Masterclass in Planting Design with James Hitchmough

It’s a wrap.

You can now catch our most popular and highly requested talk of 2024 on Vimeo.

This is a high-level introduction to the leading-edge of planting design with James Hitchmough, Professor Emeritus of University of Sheffield, a genius innovator and iconoclast in horticultural ecology.

This 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.

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Piet Oudolf At Work: A Conversation

Right from its plain brown-wrap cover, the new book ‘Piet Oudolf At Work’ strikes a different chord in how it chooses to show and tell its story.

Oudolf has always been a visual thinker and his creative process is both far more abstract, complex and subtle than can easily be described in words. So instead of verbiage, At Work visually walks us through each phase of the design process, as the landscapes he envisions in his mind make the creative leap to colour-coded plans on paper.

This is his first book to delve into such depth, openly sharing plans from nearly 30 projects in the largest collection of his drawings ever published.

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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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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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Supernaturalistic: The New Perennial Pond Garden

At its roots, the New Perennial movement in naturalistic planting design is about making gardens in symbiosis with nature. It calls for a wilder aesthetic, attuned to ecology, and informed by horticulture.

Inspired by naturally occurring habitats, such plantings are designed landscapes composed of a series of interwoven plant layers together forming a community, abstracting the patterns and rhythms found in nature.

There are no rules, only guidelines for the home gardener: Reduce garden inputs, recycle garden outputs; design with biodiversity & maintenance in mind; group plants by common habitat; work with the conditions you got; invite spontaneity; use plants as a living mulch to cover ground; come fall, leave plants to stand and amend in their own debris; above all, experimentation is the key to learning.

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