Bringing the countryside into the contemporary landscape is a popular motion, both in city planning and also in garden layout — the magnificent opening ceremony at last year’s London Olympics even included an idyllic pastoral scene with sheep, cattle and meadows set in the rolling English countryside. There has been great interest in returning to rural roots and relocating them — from growing edibles to keeping chickens and bees in the garden.
The “new ruralism” is not just about mirroring the countryside in town and suburbs; it is also about the way we perceive and how we use plants inside our houses. It is all about allowing plants to control backyard layout — the opposite of minimalism and the idea of creating outdoor rooms.
Laara Copley-Smith Garden & Landscape Design
Plants didn’t consistently take the spotlight in backyard design. Urban garden layout in the last hundred years has been mainly about producing usable outdoor spaces, with plantings as an additional decorative feature.
William Robinson was a Victorian garden designer that first pioneered a crusade against using stilted carpet bedding. He was also instrumental in introducing the use of rugged perennials as well as the belief that almost any plant, wild or exotic, could have a place in gardens.
Jocelyn H. Chilvers
Robinson’s pragmatic strategy was based on his understanding of the plant communities develop and may sympathetically unite in natural plant groupings. His planting ideas may really be looked at as the first step toward bringing how plants grow naturally in the countryside to the backyard atmosphere; in other words, bringing the rural to the urban.
Nature abhors a vacuum, we are educated. In nature wherever there is a space, a plant appropriate for those conditions will grow. Understanding this but preventing wild plants not appropriate to an urban enviroment we can make our own ruralism.
There are lots of advantages to integrating these planting ideas into contemporary garden design.
Using a greater ratio of planting to hardscape encourages a wider assortment of wildlife to the garden, helps prevent water runoff and flood, achieves yearlong blossom and foliage attention (in the same way that the countryside changes with the season), and enhances maintenance requirements — the need for weed control is almost nonexistent in nature.
The Garden Consultants, Inc..
Of all plants which make that sense of ruralism, grasses are undoubtedly the hottest. Intermingling drifts with low-maintenance perennials is simple in large, open gardens, yet to acheive the same pragmatic strategy in small gardens requires skill.
It is not a new idea, though, since both the top Victorian gardeners, Gertrude Jekyll and William Robinson, employed grasses to fantastic effect in their own revolutionary mixed plantings. Jekyll was really keen on using Miscanthus and frequently used Miscanthus sinensis ‘Variegatus’ and Miscanthus sinensis ‘Zebrinus’ within her mixed borders.
Grasses don’t have be allowed to grow naturally to present a sense of new ruralism to the backyard. This rough-cut yard brings the sensation of a pasture right up into the walls of the house, while seminaturalistic plantings meander under the trees beyond.
Dean Herald-Rolling Stone Landscapes
With true urban style, this contemporary garden reveals all the qualities of new ruralism using its planting-dominant scheme.
The plants used are standard species and are common in many gardens, yet here they’ve been utilized in a means to mimic nature. Not one of the ground is left bare; the assortment of plants have found their own spaces, since they do obviously in the countryside.
Jeffrey Erb Landscape Design
In small urban garden spaces, ruralist planting ideas can be implemented. Within this small lawn, every available space, raised bed and container has been remodeled with a broad combination of species. Ruralist planting, even on this scale, may supply wildlife with advantages — through the assortment of plants utilized as well as by the backyard’s very nature of being a small rural area within an urban setting.
More: Permit Nature Inspire Your Landscape: Grasslands into Garden