my Notes from garden

Alexandra Campbell gets expert advice about bringing some naturalistic flair to your garden.

NATURALISTIC planting design, also known as the new perennials movement, has been one of the most interesting gardening trends of the past decade.

The idea is that you use plants that are either native to your area or which grow well where you live, and you combine them in natural looking groups with ornamental grasses.

It’s a minimum care approach – if the plants grow well in your area, there shouldn’t be too many problems with pests and diseases.

The flowers are left to set seed, and seedheads will carry the interest on into the autumn or winter.

I’ve always wondered whether this is a look that works best on a large palette, such as the Hauser & Wirth gallery garden in Bruton in Somerset or the High Line in New York.

Michael Mccoy is one of the world’s leading garden designers in the naturalistic movement.

Michael says that this look does work in smaller spaces. It relies on choosing plants for their shape and texture rather than their colour.

Think about choosing plants either for their height, in rounded mounds or as ground cover.

Domestic gardeners often worry about their colour choices, but this means there’s less emphasis on specific flower colours.

Nigel Dunnett, another famous naturalistic designer, says that you only need three different kinds of plant in flower at any one time to make the garden look amazing.

When I visited one of Michael’s clients’ gardens with him, colour came from big clumps of perovskia, Sedum “Matrona”, Salvia “Indigo Spires” and Agastache “Nadine” – easy to grow perennials that flower for a long time.

You never plant just one

plant in naturalistic planting. It uses a limited palette of plants, repeating them around the garden.

Michael repeated three grasses – stipa gigantea, Calamagrostis and Miscanthus in different places in the garden I saw.

Both the Stipa and the Miscanthus are tall grasses and the miscanthus creates a rounded mound.

Many people don’t like ornamental grasses, because it’s difficult to work out how to plant them.

Michael says to “think about the height of a grass’s foliage,” and put plants about the same height around them.

Also think about whether the grasses need to be on their own – for example, the vase-shaped stalks of Stipa gigantea – or grown closely together in groups, as with Calamagrostis or Miscanthus.

He also prefers deciduous grasses to evergreens.

Deciduous grasses, such as panicum, go brown in winter, but they keep their shape. They can be cut to the ground in spring and regrow from the base.

Evergreen grasses, such as Carex or Festuca, have to have their dead foliage combed out, and may die if you cut them to the ground.

So while most evergreens are less work, evergreen grasses are more work!

I’ve found it difficult to maintain Stipa Tenuissima, or Ponytail Grass. It’s only semi-evergreen but it prefers to be combed out and it died when I cut it back completely.

So what percentage of a border should be ornamental grasses?

From my experience, just popping one or two grasses in a border doesn’t really work. Michael says that around 20 to 30% works well. ■