HOW TO THROW GOOD SHAPES
Be savvy with shrubs to achieve sophistication, colour and form CIAR BYRNE
IN THE 1960s and 70s, shrubberies were all the rage. Proud homeowners would buy shrubs of every type and plant them all together in a dense thicket. then in the 1980s, the New Perennial movement came along with its prairie- style herbaceous plants and grasses offering a light, airy vision of the future that has domiwere nated garden design since. in his foreword to a new book shrouded in Light: Naturalistic Planting inspired By Wild shrublands, out now, designer
Nigel Dunnett calls for a revival of shrubs — but as part of naturalistic design rather than planting one of each specimen in a ‘stodgy shrubbery’.
MAKE A MOSAIC
HE EXPLAiNs: ‘i think there was this sentiment that shrubs
boring and heavy and unchanging and completely unfashionable and perennials presented themselves as this natural, sparkling, quick, beautiful, colourful alternative.
‘i’ve long thought this is a bit crazy. Particularly in the UK, the natural state of our landscapes is they want to be shrubby and woody and to keep them as just perennials is quite unsustainable, because you
have to keep chopping back. the book’s authors Kevin Philip Williams and Michael Guidi, horticulturalists at the Denver Botanic Gardens, look at how shrubs grow in the wild.
they talk about ‘shrub mosaics’ in which the same plants are repeated, forming patterns in the landscape and propose we take inspiration from these wild shrublands in our own gardens. the trend for
perennials suits the horticulture industry because they are cheaper and easier to grow than shrubs and provide regular work as they need to be cut back every year.
Williams says: ‘ For a grower, bringing on a shrub to size to sell takes many more seasons than offering a freshly germinated plug which you can put out on a landscape.
‘But these things can be used in tandem and you can create a garden with much more dynamic effects and greater ecological benefits.’
REAL BACKBONE
sHRUBs add complexity to a garden which is good for biodiversity, rather than the twodimensional landscape offered by perennials. While prairies were seen as ‘landscapes of ease’, the early pioneers in America feared shrublands as they could not be cultivated for agriculture and were therefore places where people might starve, says Guidi.
We should now embrace this more challenging aesthetic, he argues.
Dunnett adds: ‘there’s a lack of experimentation because people are just repeating the same combinations. it is time to shake things up a little bit.’
At the Barbican in London, Dunnett has brought these ideas to life with Beech Gardens, a public roof garden combining low-density shrubs with meadow plantings.
Here he has Amelanchier lamarckii for spring flowers and autumn foliage, Philadelphus Belle Étoile for summer scent and Viburnum x bodnantense ‘Dawn’ for winter scent, as well as Cornus kousa for its flowers, fruit and foliage. these shrubs provide the backbone for perennial planting.