Choosing and using plants. Principles of planting
When a garden has been built it remains incomplete until it is planted. How many and which plants you choose and how you group them depends on many factors. Planting can simply answer a specific requirements, such as to disguise as unsightly view, to give shade, to provide food, to appeal to the sense of smell or to fill a damp and shady corner. But more often, plants make the green bulky infill of the framework to extend the design while giving pleasure throughout the year with seasonal changes of colour and texture in foliage, berries, fruits and flowers.
You should also remember that the garden, if not a conscious duplication of natural vegetation, as in the ecologist's wild garden, often contains features that imitate nature. Pools, rockeries and stream beds depend on plants and groupings that interpret the sort of planting that occurs naturally, no matter how stylized to suit your garden. There are, of course, other lessons to learn from nature's distribution. An area of natural vegetation is often dominated by one or two species with only the occasional intrusion of others. This fact gives an area its feel, whether it be pine woodland or heather moor.
It is to the landscape of such areas that we retreat to relax on holiday, and it is a similarly simple and discreet planting scheme that will provide a place of enjoyment in the garden. It is not necessary to fill every corner with a different species of plant. True, a garden is a contrived place and many (including the horticulturist) see merit in the range of plants that it is possible to include, but often interest lies between the contrived flower borders in many gardens and the gentle spontaneity of natural plant grouping.
These days many people have neither the time nor the inclination to garden intensively, so the obvious answer is to settle for relaxed planting that allows nature to influence the result, perhaps letting wild plants remain alongside their hybridized relatives.
Contiguous to these reasons for choosing plants, is the desire to make plant groupings that satisfy personal taste in form, shape and colour. Successful groupings will strengthen a ground pattern, contrast with background planting or support a certain colour scheme.
Your increasing knowledge of plants and experience in the garden will help you to make successful groups of plants that work on all scales from trees down to the smallest ground cover subject.
You should also remember that the garden, if not a conscious duplication of natural vegetation, as in the ecologist's wild garden, often contains features that imitate nature. Pools, rockeries and stream beds depend on plants and groupings that interpret the sort of planting that occurs naturally, no matter how stylized to suit your garden. There are, of course, other lessons to learn from nature's distribution. An area of natural vegetation is often dominated by one or two species with only the occasional intrusion of others. This fact gives an area its feel, whether it be pine woodland or heather moor.
It is to the landscape of such areas that we retreat to relax on holiday, and it is a similarly simple and discreet planting scheme that will provide a place of enjoyment in the garden. It is not necessary to fill every corner with a different species of plant. True, a garden is a contrived place and many (including the horticulturist) see merit in the range of plants that it is possible to include, but often interest lies between the contrived flower borders in many gardens and the gentle spontaneity of natural plant grouping.
These days many people have neither the time nor the inclination to garden intensively, so the obvious answer is to settle for relaxed planting that allows nature to influence the result, perhaps letting wild plants remain alongside their hybridized relatives.
Contiguous to these reasons for choosing plants, is the desire to make plant groupings that satisfy personal taste in form, shape and colour. Successful groupings will strengthen a ground pattern, contrast with background planting or support a certain colour scheme.
Your increasing knowledge of plants and experience in the garden will help you to make successful groups of plants that work on all scales from trees down to the smallest ground cover subject.
