What next for planting design?
Designers Tom Stuart-Smith and Noël Kingsbury, and garden thinker Tim Richardson discuss where the New Perennial movement goes from here
With an emphasis of form and combination, and a carefully selected palette of plants, the New Perennial movement has transformed planting over the past 20 years. We asked three experts what might happen next
Like many designers of my generation, the Kew Conference of 1994 was a key moment when it seemed as though the massed planting of perennials became the new orthodox.
Piet Oudolf has, without doubt, been the standard bearer. The man who made us fall in love with death and decay also introduced us to so many new perennials that had more subdued and subtle charms than many of the screaming hemerocallis and crocosmias we had got used to. And much more than this, these plants were well behaved, generally long lived, slowly expanding and with a long season of textural interest. I recall the laminated display panels that used to be in the garden at Pensthorpe in Norfolk, which showed Piet’s planting plans of ten years before and it was still pretty much the same; the same confident, painterly sweeps of soft, Venetian reds and browns, and a brilliantly controlled abundance.
Cassian Schmidt’s experiments at Hermannshof in Germany around the same time achieved a different sort of stability. A much more dynamic one, where plants, carefully chosen for their growth characteristics and habitat were planted in a tight matrix and left to fight it out. Even though the matrix was repeated over a large area, the planting had an electrifying spontaneity to it. There was a tension between the dry science of the matrix and the breathtaking naturalism of the result. It was, and still is, enormously inspiring.
The same kind of tension exists in James Hitchmough’s pioneering work on perennial seeding [see our feature on page 42]. We have collaborated over about ten years on a variety of projects and I still think that the combination of planting and seeding offers endless possibilities, only a fraction of which have been explored. There is something almost alchemical about the transformation of a packet of mixed seeds, into a dynamic, changing meadow landscape. But ‘landscape’ is the key word. This is a technique for big spaces, not small back gardens.
If I were to be critical of where we are now in our use of perennials, I think that many designers use them like so much paint. I was recently working on a garden in the USA, where when we came to set out the plants, the gardener shouted “OK guys! Let’s get some product in there!”
This route is a creative dead end. Another, more rewarding route is one that takes more time and more understanding. This is one where we do what many of the best gardeners have always done: to create and nurture places that are designed, like any ecological system, to develop and change over time, and which develop a spatial, ecological and narrative richness. With this approach the design is just a starting point, not a fixed prescription.
There is snag here though, in that this approach relies on having knowledgeable, creative gardeners who understand that caring for a garden can be every bit as worthwhile as designing one. With so little career structure for aspiring gardeners and so little pay on offer, it is not very surprising that they are in short supply.
“There is something almost alchemical about the transformation of a packet of mixed seeds into a dynamic, changing meadow landscape”
The past 20-odd years have seen perennials replace shrubs as the mainstay of the garden centre, and the main focus of many gardens. This has happened alongside a move towards more naturalistic planting styles and, what is probably the most influential movement of all, the concept of the wildlife garden – the garden as mini-nature reserve. What has all this meant for the day-to-day management of gardens? And where is it likely to lead, particularly for larger gardens or public spaces?
Fundamental to the contemporary interest in perennials is the fact that the New Perennial range is very different to the one that dominated gardens for much of the 20th century. Whereas ‘old’ perennials, such as delphiniums and Michaelmas daisies, often died out or deteriorated without regular attention, ‘new’ ones are seriously longlived, usually with no reduction in flowering or other performance over time: many species of Geranium, Euphorbia or Rudbeckia just keep on going – and keep on growing, potentially forming weed suppressing clumps. Of the shorter-lived species that are now used, many readily self-sow, another aspect of the more relaxed modern attitude to garden management.
However, there is a problem with weed control, especially for those in the mild and wetter west of Britain. North European grasses have an optimum operating temperature below 10 C, while for the vast majority of perennials have an optimum operating temperature above that, so weedy grass growth during mild winters will inevitably dominate later-emerging perennials. Perennial plantings can need a lot of maintenance compared to shrubs, and the increasing opprobrium directed at glyphosatebased herbicides makes weed management more problematic still. Some ornamental grasses and short-lived garden perennials can also add to the problem through their very extensive self-sowing.
For those gardeners who want perennials but with reduced maintenance, or who manage larger, or public, spaces, the lesson seems to be firstly, dense planting – I use around nine plants per square metre – and secondly, using a high proportion of semi-evergreen plants at ground level. Inspired by several decades of research into planting design in Germany, I have been trying this at home with randomised mixes of Geranium species, which grow at low temperatures, evergreens, such as Phlomis russeliana, and a more limited number of later-flowering species that have both big root systems and a limited (but definite) ability to spread, including asters, small-flowered Solidago species and, of course, grasses.
There is room for bulbs, and possibly also spring-growing but summer-dormant perennials such as many Primula, Anemone and Ajuga species. However, there is too much competition for slow-growing or delicate species and many sub-shrubs, such as lavenders, and not much room for self-sowers. Research into planting mixes such as this show a lot of potential for genuinely low-maintenance planting. More artistically driven and highdiversity plant combinations will, however, inevitably require more looking after. Matching plant selection with availability of time for maintenance looks like the essential relationship to work out.
“‘Old’ perennials often died out or deteriorated without regular attention, ‘new’ ones are seriously long-lived”
The decisive moment for the New Perennial movement in Britain can be dated to 1994, when Piet Oudolf was one of the speakers at a Kew Conference entitled ‘Perennial Perspectives’.
What was most heretical about Oudolf’s approach was the way he claimed never to think about colour when making planting plans; his focus is solely on plant form, the structure of plantings in drifts and clumps, and an overall rhythm or sense of continuum in the garden. This was, and is, anathema to the Arts and Crafts tradition of Gertrude Jekyll. In time the narrative or episodic quality to traditional English garden design would be jettisoned in favour of a garden structure in which there was no beginning, middle or end – just an overall space flavour. We were moving towards an immersive as opposed to pictorial approach.
Many – but by no means all – British gardeners took to New Perennials with a palpable sense of relief, replacing shrubs with the larger grasses, generally paring down the plant palette and letting colour ‘just happen’. Some cottage gardeners, working in a shabby-chic, serendipitously ‘embroidered’ manner, started to see the merit of clarity in the form of drift plantings. With this palette of grasses and ‘prairie’ perennials, early autumn became a kind of ‘fifth season’ in many gardens, with September/October eclipsing May/ June as the horticultural high point.
It took a decade or so for New Perennials to go mainstream but it was helped along by some high-profile Chelsea Flower Show gardens by the likes of Christopher Bradley-Hole and Tom Stuart-Smith. By the mid 2000s, New Perennials had become ‘smart’.
More recently there has been a focus on the replication or selective quotation of ‘plant communities’ experienced in the wild, and the treatment of gardens almost as labs for horticultural experimentation. The Sheffield School under James Hitchmough has led the way with this ‘scientific’ attitude. It’s a methodology that was always there in New Perennials; another early name for the style was ‘matrix planting’, while proponents tend to dislike the term ‘naturalistic’.
So what next for the New Perennial movement? Garden style tends to move in cycles of decades and half-decades, and in our garden culture as a whole since around 2012 I think we have seen a movement away from hard-core, Oudolfian New Perennials and back towards some of the complexity of traditional English style. We are seeing the return of shrubs (including roses) to gardens, as the larger grasses have become less popular – perhaps because they are such a signature of the New Perennial look.
British gardeners are very competitive and that is a good thing because complacency equals dull uniformity – my recent experience of New Perennial gardens in the Netherlands, where I saw a number of gardens featuring almost identical plants. A sense of competition inspires originality and individuality, and as a result garden style in Britain is in a continual state of evolution.
“We have seen a movement back towards some of the complexity of traditional English style. We are seeing the return of shrubs (including roses) as larger grasses become less popular”