Gardening is about more
than hard labor and getting plants to thrive. Somewhere between
backbreaking digging, shoveling, and dragging home plants, mulch,
and fertilizer is a mysterious creative process that comes into
play. It quietly tells us what plant goes where, the shape of
the bed, the curve of the path, and the position of the bench.
For the lucky few it comes naturally, even intuitively. The rest
of us scratch our heads and ponder designs and photographs of
public and private gardens that work and pour through books trying
to explain design.
That creative process
is, well, complicated. It juggles such concepts as color, 
texture,
form, order, unity, and rhythm. Most professionals designers have
to go school to understand design principles. Two very different
books that try to translate those principles and the how-to of
the creative design process are The Well-Designed Mixed Garden
by Tracy Disabato-Aust and Designing with Plants by Piet
Oudolf (both Timber Press).
The Well-Designed
Mixed Garden follows on the heels of the author’s best-selling
The Well-Tended Perennial Garden. Her first book was a
reference book on the how-to of maintenance for perennials. In
this ambitious effort she tackles design and maintenance issues
of the mixed border.
The book’s hefty size
is intimidating but don’t let that put you off. More than half
of the 460-plus page book is comprised of spreadsheets, charts,
and lists — basically reference material. The spreadsheets list
plants alphabetically showing characteristics such as form, height,
width, flower color, flowering month, foliage color, foliage interest,
texture and design color. A separate culture chart lists plants
alphabetically explaining their soil, moisture, light, and soil
ph needs. You’ll also find a section of lists — plants for specific
colors schemes, textures, flowers, foliage, fruit, and color.
The balance of the
book is devoted to a discussion of design elements. The author
covers color, texture, form, scale, proportion, and line in this
section. The text is rich with information and the author’s insights.
The level of detail rivals that of a textbook, best suited to
gardeners with a serious interest in design or setting out to
become professionals.
But the heart of the
book is Disabat-Aust’s discussion of color. She tackles color
interactions, texture and form, light, intensity, value, and hue.
Light, she explains, starts with a blue cast at daylight, then
warms to reddish or pinkish, then orange, then yellow and a white
with a tingle of yellow, and finally blue or violet. The author
gives advice on balancing saturated colors (with the use of neutrals)
and taking advantage of the fact that smooth surfaces reflect
more light than matte or rough-surfaced ones (texture and form).
For good proportion and color balance (intensity), she suggests
combining a larger group of lower-toned colors with a small amount
of more intense color. To balance full-intensity colors, use more
darker colors than light colors. Intense colors in the garden
can be balanced with the use of more darker than light colors
(value).
Disabat-Aust doesn’t
overlook the emotional aspect of each color. She goes through
the color spectrum, explaining the feelings that each color elicits
and associations made with it.
The writing style is
at its best when the author adopts a personal tone: “I’m not sure
why I didn’t want orange around — probably some preconceived notion
that it was bad in some way and it might mistakenly get next to
a pink and we would have to call 911.”
Two other sections
are used to demonstrate design elements in action: designs for
small, medium, and large gardens and the encyclopedia of plant
combinations. The generous use of gorgeous photos and diagrams
provides much needed relief to the dense information. Also welcome
are the detailed photo captions that identify plants and the use
of their Latin names.
A book with a totally
different approach is the beautifully illustrated and designed
Designing with Plants by Piet Oudolf. The Dutch designer
and nurseryman explains his philosophy of design through Noel
Kingsbury, a British landscape designer. According to Oudolf,
gardens that are the most successful are those that balance art
and control with nature and wildness. His goal is to bring nature
and gardens closer together. One observer noted that his plants
look wild but his gardens do not.
To accomplish this,
Oudolf concentrates on perennials, introducing the reader to obscure
garden plants such as astrantias, grasses, and umbellifers (members
of the Apiaceae — cow parsley family) with strong structures.
The unavailability of those plants led him to start his own nursery,
where he breeds new varieties for specific design purposes. The
nursery focuses on breeding asters, astrantias, monardas, and
sanguisorbas.
In Oudolf’s naturalistic
designs, color takes a back seat to structure and form. “If the
forms and shapes of plants in a border work well together, and
you choose plants that still resemble their wild ancestors, it
is difficult to imagine an inharmonious color combination arising.”
The reason, the book explains, is the natural proportion between
the flowers and the foliage of wild plants; the extra foliage
provides a green buffer that’s missing in garden plants with oversized
flowers. “
A good planting,” Oudolf
says, “should have enough variety of shape to look interesting
in a black-and-white photograph — looking at it again in color
should add another dimension, but a secondary one. Color has much
more to do with the overall mood of the planting. Finally there
is the dimension of time to consider, as perennials and grasses
have such a dynamic way of growing, changing form dramatically
as the year proceeds.”
Oudolf recommends that
gardeners study their raw material: the plants. The book guides
the reader through a close examination of plants, first by grouping
plants according to general flower forms that relate to aesthetics
or how they work in the garden: spines, buttons and globes, plumes,
umbels, daises, screens and curtains, and leaves and shape. Leaf
shape and texture are examined next. Only then is color and the
moods evoked broached in wonderfully descriptive categories: hot,
cool, sweet, somber, and earthy.
In “Designing schemes”
Oudolf shows readers how to apply his design principles. From
a selection of plants that are close to their wild ancestors,
he builds structure and form using shapes and textures and adds
filler plants to bridge any gaps and add transitions. Grasses
are among his favorite plants, a subject to which he devoted his
last book, Gardening with Grasses (Timber Press).
Odulf’s landscape designs
are famous for creating feeling and atmosphere and the book’s
photographs beautifully capture mood in the garden. He explains
that “mood is something that can only be planned into a garden
to a limited extent.” Even so, he says, if you accept certain
conditions, you can work with the surroundings and variables like
weather and light to create garden moods that make the most of
their circumstances. Techniques that help include using grasses
to catch the light, plants that provide movement, and tall perennials
for drama and mysticism.
Resources www.timberpress.com
