Think of plants in groups, not single specimens
Are your plants looking lonely, surrounded by small patches of high-maintenance bare soil? If they look as if they’re suffering in solitary confinement, maybe they are.
Many plant and landscape experts have begun thinking of plants in terms of communities, instead of as individual specimens. They recommend that home gardeners look to the wild for inspiration.
“Thinking of plants in terms of masses and groupings, as opposed to objects to be placed individually in a sort of specimen garden, is what most young people are really responding to now,” says Brian Sullivan, vice president for landscape, gardens and outdoor collections at the New York Botanical Garden.
The shift in landscaping toward looking at plants as interrelated species gained prominence almost a decade ago with the opening of the High Line, a public park built along an old elevated rail line in New York City, Sullivan says. In a move considered radical at the time — but replicated in parks and gardens across the country since then — the designers of the High Line went with a wilder look, with plantings resembling roadside grasses and wildflowers more than a traditional garden.
Many horticulturalists and landscapers say such gardens — with consideration of how plants benefit each other, and birds, insects and other wildlife — look better for more of the year, and are more functional and self-sustaining.
For landscape designer Thomas Rainer, co-author of “Planting for a Post-Wild World: Designing Plant Communities for Resilient Landscapes” with Claudia West (Timber Press, 2015), his epiphany began when he pulled over to the side of a road one day and really looked at what was growing naturally there.