The age of classic English gardens brought the beauty of herbaceous plants to public lighting. Finally, these beautiful works were brought across the pond to the United States, where the same plants melted in the warmth of many American households. The manicured, eclectic planting palettes need continuous management and a large budget to control reseeding and invading.
However, the New American garden has introduced an equally skillful approach that looks to regional arenas for inspiration. Large masses of crops in controlled, monocultural blocks keep the makeup bold and easy. These are layouts, highlighting plants in drifts that are naturalized, appreciating them to get their form and feel.
Nowadays, this controlled, natural garden artwork is easily achieved in most home gardens and landscape layouts. Here’s how.
Matthew Cunningham Landscape Design LLC
Adopt the landscape you have. Find plants that flourish in your garden and include more of them. If it is a sunny spot, look at using more grasses to dominate the ground plane. If the area is shady, look at incorporating more trees and using ferns for groundcover.
This beautiful garden has masses of fern covering the ground plane and groves of birch sited to make a few intrigue beyond — it is easy, bold and calming.
Stone Farm
Keep it easy. Stick to one or two crops to your garden’s groundcover. Find something lush that will fill out with little maintenance. Geranium macrorrhizum is a huge ground cover in colour, and is as deer-resistant as crops come. This designer dominated the space with this plant and a sedge — trouble-free plants that will live for decades. The textures complement each other superbly.
Creative Garden Spaces
Plant and Split everything you enjoy. If you have few resources, split herbaceous plants in the spring to offer you more of everything you enjoy. Using the same plant has a surprisingly bold and beautiful effect.
Here, irregular stepping stones were made more amorous by planting Mazus repans round them. Nandina (right), brunnera (in path) and sedges maintain the palette easy and graceful.
Blue Ridge Landscaping
Select the ideal plant. Rather than going overboard with many different crops, try to find one that will fill all of your needs. This mass of Solidago ‘Fireworks’ is easy and incredibly capable of covering the ground aggressively, restricting potential weeding, mulching and maintenance. This large space could have easily housed dozens of different plants (which would’ve required a PhD to handle), but this designer saw one that worked and moved large.
Huettl Landscape Architecture
Aim to get a naturalized composition. If you’re going to combine in many different types of crops, aim to get a casual, yet less orderly approach. Here, drifts of needlegrass (Nasella sp), reed grass (Calamagrostis sp) and Festuca maireii are impregnated using a mix of flowering crops. Scale of the walk and the lines create this composition a little bit more palatable.
JLF & Associates, Inc..
Focus on scale and repetition. This expansive house is elegantly seated in its garden. Employing the same, easy plant palette with blossoms and trees on different scales actually connects this house to the greater landscape.
A stroll outside is the ideal classroom you can have if you want to know about scale and repetition to your garden. Nature is large, grand and daring — do not be scared to make the same statements in your garden.
Learn more about scale and repetition in the garden
Jeffrey Gordon Smith Landscape Architecture
Produce an experience in every outdoor area. Pool decks and patios without a garden simply don’t feel good to me no matter what substance is used. Plant these distances to make an experience of location. Consider your website first, ask exactly what the website wants and find plants that will work best for the garden.
This photograph shows a rather simple palette of robust plants: Red-Hot Poker (Kniphofia sp), yarrow (Achellea sp), and geranium all have good cultivars to choose from. The thyme between the pavers makes the space elegant, when it could have appeared stark.
Be daring and easy. Search for plants which can be aggressive, but won’t be invasive into surrounding landscapes. You can learn about plants by seeing what grows well on your climate and growing conditions and touring public gardens close to you.
This gardens summer palette is dominated by Miscanthus ‘Giganteus,’ Miscanthus ‘Gracillimus,’ Agastache ‘Blue Fortune’ and Pycanthemum muticum. Even though it might have been simple to include dozens more species to this area, the energy of this composition is because of its simplicity and efficacy.
These plants outcompete bud seed blowing in from 30 ft away. Their aggressive nature enabled this garden to be planted at a fraction of the expense of traditional gardens and overall management demands are almost nonexistent. These are the right plants in the ideal location.
More: Why mass plantings are so pleasing to the eye