Create impact with a single plant type
Create maximum impact in your garden by planting a collection of the same plant type. Landscape designer Franchesca Watson explains
The love of plants
Keen gardeners love plants, and often will develop a passion for a particular type, which can be as diverse as roses, succulents or palms. There is always a tendency to develop collections of one’s favourites and this preponderance can get tricky to incorporate into a well designed garden. In south africa we are lucky to have the example of our many beautiful botanic gardens where collections of specific types of indigenous plants are incorporated into well designed spaces. of course it does help to have a surfeit of space.
finding The ideal setting
The nature of the plant type can often lend itself to planting in a specific style. For example, the naturalistic underplanting of the olive trees along the stream walk at Babylonstoren with the clivia collection taking centre stage. The dappled light is perfect for the clivias and they provide a natural but neat foil for the twisted canopy of indigenous olive and naturalised oak trees above.
succulents have a completely different nature and are much trickier to set out in a pleasing gardenesque way, but the garden at obesa nursery in graaff-reinet has achieved wonders with them. I think the secret here is some aged giants to give scale and a good succulent ground cover to hold it all together.
Colour using a colour theme is a great way of organising a collection. I’ll never forget finding the collection of astilbes at holehird gardens in the english Lake district – a blaze of carefully curated frothy astilbes in every colour moving in the breeze. It has all the advantages of the impact of a massed planting, with the added interest of progressive colour to engage one. Locally, Jenny Ferreira incorporated a beautiful collection of salvias into her lovely Wellington garden, Klein optenhorst. The interesting leaves and many hued flower spikes of salvias make them easy to work into a soft and less formal garden.
one step away from an actual collection is a planting featuring a number of one kind of plant. I recently planted roses in gradations of colours from dark pink to light pinky white on a pair of long pergolas in a farm garden. simple and effective.
grass plantings are particularly easy to add to any garden – it can be a selection of grasses of similar heights with differing colours and seed heads or one can incorporate a selection of many grasses with differing leaf thicknesses and bulking. If you have a formal garden, grasses are great surrounded by small clipped hedges of a contrasting colour to offset their spiky texture.
other Themes other ways of selecting or collecting plants for your garden can be quite intellectual, such as the garden at Chelsea this year that featured plants only from the pea family, or gardens that feature plants only from a specific area or country. It’s a great way to create focus. Franchesca Watson 082 808 1287 franchescawatson.com
‘at the moment gardens with a particular type of plant as a theme seem to be catching our imagination’