The fear is everywhere, the fear of making a mistake. The nobility of learning through trial and error, though often preached, is evidently a concept that we abandoned with childhood. There is a view that mistake based learning stops at a certain point, a point after which we can be microscopically prescriptive and everything will go without a hitch for evermore. There is nowhere this phenomenon is more noticeable than with planting. Oh the stories I could tell of the hideously tedious descriptions I have endured of the minutiae of environmental conditions in people’s gardens. All in the vain and misguided notion that a plant is an immovable feast, that a planting plan is rigid and its refinement outlawed under some obscure EU Horticultural Directive.
The fear. Inevitably something was “sowed” in the wrong place. Inevitably it will all go wrong. It seems to escape notice that the basis of this whole thing is experimentation. That to follow the prescription in this, just like any other walk of life, inevitably leads to the insipid, bland and predictable. Where are the yellows and reds? I didn’t design any yellows or reds. You wouldn’t entertain someone traipsing through your house running the design into the ground because they can’t find any velvet wallpaper or feature walls. They are not there because someone decided not to put them there. It is possible to go beyond what’s expected.
 |
| Experiment With Planting |
Going beyond the habitual is, or should be, the whole point. It’s almost as if you have put in train some irreversibly catastrophic chain of events, some prologue to unaviodable Armageddon by sticking a hydrangea in the ground. It can be moved if it doesn’t thrive and/or you don’t like it. I repeat; it can be moved.
It’s easy to see how it happens. Our default setting is cautiousness and we seem to need a reference point but I would have thought that Home and Garden Lifestyle TV has provided enough inspiration over the past decade for most of us to now feel sufficiently emboldened to go above and beyond the banal. It’s never a good thing when your interpretation of a design dilemma aligns with that of your parents. When you find yourself on the same page as the generation that gave us Leylandii you need to take a long hard look at yourself. Seriously.
On a recent project I planted two huge clusters of Digitalis, as bookends, at either end of a large curved bed. I had never seen it done quite that way before, but the mere fact that it deviated from the typical only served to enhance the look.
The basis of good design is experimentation. Experienced designers refine and tweak as they attempt to bring a scheme to life. They move pots, move clusters, combine colours, shapes and textures, stand back have a look, have a look from a different angle, tweak it again until something emerges.
It is impossible to be rigidly prescriptive when it comes to planting. A slant will emerge that is an improvement on what was conceived. Anything that improves the result, however offbeat, is a good thing. I’m sure there were a few strange glances thrown the way of the first designer to plant Calamagrostis, Erysimum and Armeria together. Now everyone’s at it.
There are seven billion people on the planet, it’s hard to be original. To be original within the constraints of a garden which ultimately needs to be workable under several headings is harder still. Experiment. You won’t believe your eyes.
Leave a Reply