Since I introduced the term Wildscaping into the lexicon last spring, it’s started to take on a life of its own.

What is it again?

Wildscaping is about using plant-driven landscape design to create and sustain dynamic garden spaces, filled with beauty and wildlife, to rekindle our relationship to the natural world.

That’s the vision in a nutshell.

I also spoke about picking up glowing threads in the global conversation and then vanished into a summer of big life stuff and making new gardens.

In my hiatus, I’ve also taken the time to read up on some of the latest thinking in ecology and planting design. I’m excited to have found some great books and strong paths of convergence well worth sharing.

My first review is for a magnum opus, written by Nigel Dunnett and published earlier this year on Filbert Press.

Naturalistic Planting Design: The Essential Guide more than lives up to its title – presenting an overarching vision to shift the still emerging discipline of planting design forward to the next phase in its evolution.

Highly relevant material for landscape and horticulture professionals, design students, and serious home gardeners alike.

The book takes on some very big questions:

How can we cut through layers of complexity to rethink and simplify the design, installation, and management of naturalistic landscapes?

How can we actualize the power of plants to more effectively drive ecological function in our towns and cities?

What are the new best practices and solutions for success?

If anyone is qualified to write something of this scope, it’s Nigel Dunnett, Professor of Planting Design and Urban Horticulture in the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Sheffield.

For over 20 years now, he has put ecological theory and horticultural research to the test as a planting designer with a focus on creating low-input, high-impact plantings. He’s been on something of a quest to reimagine greener solutions for both the public space and private landscapes in every imaginable context from green roof to rain gardens, and swales to meadows.

He is well known for his Pictorial Meadows projects to design meadows from either seed or turf and for breakthrough projects like the London 2012 Olympic Park, one of many collaborations with Sheffield associate, Professor James Hitchmough, and designer Sarah Price.

Planting design as an art form: tuned to nature.

Far from purely academic, Dunnett’s passion stems from a lifelong sense of connection to the sublime in nature, deepened by horticultural travels to a diversity of spectacular wild habitats in China, South Africa, the U.S., Australia, South America, amongst others.

In many respects, The Essential Guide picks up where recent significant titles leave off, like Planting in a Post Wild World by Thomas Rainer and Claudia West (2015) and Planting: A New Perspective by Piet Oudolf and Noel Kingsbury (2013).

Like them, Dunnett takes us back before moving forward – looking at the origins of naturalism in Northern Europe and how these informed the prevailing styles found in contemporary naturalism. He calls these Technocratic, Impressionistic and Modernistic, which roughly align to movements in Germany, England, the Netherlands respectively – although there is plenty of cross-pollination between them.

After evaluating and critiquing the traits of each style, he distills their strongest elements into one unified theory to reach what he envisions as a higher creative sweet spot.

He calls the resultant approach Universal Flow, modeled on archetypal patterns of growth that emerge on every scale in the physical universe, from the molecular to the greater cosmos. It’s also universal in the respect that his methods can be applied to any given habitat, irrespective of locale.

The overall approach is immensely versatile in creating multi-dimensional designed landscapes with enhanced levels of beauty and ecological function – adaptable to all kinds of radical niches in the urban landscape: from highway medians, urban wasteland, green roofs, to vertical walls, bioswales, hellstrips, wherever plants will grow in a community.

This is the core of his vision for Future Nature – a timely call for a plant-charged future that leads off its own special section of the book.

Seed the revolution

So, how might we put all this into motion?

Over the course of nearly 20 years, Nigel Dunnett and frequent Sheffield University collaborator Professor James Hitchmough have developed a comprehensive design methodology using customized seed mixes of annuals and perennials to create highly diverse intermingled plantings with a density of vegetation not achievable by conventional means.

This is the hallmark of the #shefplanting approach – rooted in a biogeographical understanding of various naturally occurring plant communities and the ecological forces driving the system.

Working from seed makes it much easier to create naturalistic style plantings on a massive scale at a reasonable price point. The design is in the mix and the devil is in the details of site preparation and long term management, all of which they have clearly sussed.

The solution to the latter comes in the form of a thick layer of sand (alternatively fine gravel), serving as protective mulch, weed barrier, and seeding medium.

Hitchmough writes about this at length in his essential companion book Sowing Beauty on Timber Press in which, he references projects where he will replicate a given geo-specific plant community from seed, albeit in a completely different setting than its origins.

For example, he recreated a slice of North American prairie in the home garden of designer Tom Stuart Smith in Hartfordshire, England. The common denominator is the shared set of conditions, which enables the relocated prairie plant community to thrive.

A new set of building blocks

With this book, Dunnett steps boldly into his own with a versatile and simplified hybrid approach to naturalistic planting design, along with a full toolkit to put it into practice.

He’s not restricting his approach in any way – working from seed, specially grown wildflower turf, nursery grown plugs and pots, and bringing in multi-stem shrubs and trees. Adapting to local conditions or using engineered substrates. Whatever the project requires.

In the interest of clarity, he changes up the language of planting design. Instead of talking about layers in a planting,  he reduces it all down to to three primary building blocks: The Ceiling, walls, floor.

It’s super easy to understand.

Basically, the ceiling of the landscape is the trees; the walls are the upright structural elements like shrubs and tall grasses; the floor is all the herbaceous plants that fill up the room.

This approach also enables the designer to work from a wider palette of naturally occurring habitats, where distinct layers are not always so evident.

He also encourages us to not overly rely on perennials and grasses – emphasizing the versatility of multi-stem shrubs and coppiced trees for structure.

Unlike say Piet Oudolf who stresses the importance of structure, Dunnett takes a more impressionistic approach in stressing the role of colour.

He sets out a number of related design concepts, such as leveraging the power of three with a combination of at least three colour flowering plants flowering en masse at any one time, a principle, which can then be applied to any number of different habitats or settings.

He doesn’t limit his actual plant choices either, freely combining native and non-native plants to amplify not only the visual wow factor but boost ecological diversity and value to wildlife. Given his position at Sheffield, he has the peer-reviewed research to back up his approach.

By choice, The Essential Guide book is not loaded up with plants lists. Its purpose is to open our minds to experiment for ourselves.

The Toolkit alone, is worth the price of admission, as it takes you through the entire process of creating a project from scratch and getting it right. For many of us, his approach will be different and well worth incorporating into your own method.

Real world examples

For every new idea advanced in the book, Dunnett supports it with inspiring and instructive examples drawn from his own extensive portfolio of urban design landscape projects.

Key examples include the aforementioned Pictorial Meadows work, where neglected wasteland or urban space is transformed into prolifically blooming wildflower meadows; London’s Olympic Park of perennial meadows and swales initially created for the 2012 Olympics; the Barbican culture complex in London, a strong representation of Dunnett’s latest work to create highly sustainable modular plantings in a Brutalist urban site in the heart of London.

Of course, best practices start at home. Dunnett takes us through the making of his own home garden in Yorkshire which shows how the essential principles of his overall approach can also successfully be scaled down to a residential-sized garden.

Essential reading

There is a lot to love in The Essential Guide with as much value for newbies as for designers seeking to broaden their frontiers.  I’ll be interested to see how these very international ideas percolate over time– and how they influence prevailing styles in Europe or in North America vs. China.

I also like how Nigel Dunnett takes the time to tell his own story up front and how he came to his passion for plants and wild spaces. It makes the entire experience so much more relatable when you get to know him first.

I don’t necessarily identify with all the same design aesthetics but neither did I get the sense that was expected.  The reality is that each of us will find their own balance between all the variables, but it’s vital to open up your sense of what’s possible.

For example, I will never be a colourist, more drawn to the implicit power of restraint and understatement.

Taking it home

Two years back, after the experience of helping to plant Piet Oudolf’s botanical garden in Delaware, I returned home to work on what was for me, a very different kind of landscape. A grass matrix in full sun, beach sand on a sloping hill up by our cabin.

We contoured the slopes first to handle the sometimes violent extremes of weather we get here, catching rainwater from our log cabin’s roof into buried pipes that feed into a long serpentine bioswale.

I framed the area with conifers (Picea omorika), stands of native Sumac (Rhus typhina, R. laciniata, and R. aromatica ‘Gro-Low’), River Birch (Betula nigra ‘Cully’) to connect the area with the forest beyond .

I went about the planting differently than usual, laying out the entire space by feel, mostly using coloured flags as placeholders until I sourced the plants. I experimented with methods and plant choices drawn from my experiences with Piet, Cassian Schmidt, and Roy Diblik. But at the same time, I chose to set out planting patterns and associations in a more fragmented way – creating mosaic clusters of perennials and grasses that repeated themselves in subtle variations throughout the space.

In my own way, I’m nudging the frontiers, translating their approach to a smaller scale garden, to localize it to my own neck of the woods.

This is the first time I’ve even mentioned it here on the blog but it’s the closest I’ve come to date to realizing my own vision for Wildscaping.

Now having read Nigel’s Essential Guide, I’m amazed to have stumbled across so many common threads with things I discovered on my own. In fact, it’s kinda wonderful and weird;-)

I’ll let you know how my new garden turns out next year. Meanwhile, I’ve also heard that Professor Dunnett is already working on a sequel to The Essential Guide.

My advice is you’ll want to get coppicing and read this one first.

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All Photos by kind permission of © Nigel Dunnett except where noted.