NATURALISTIC PLANTING STYLES
What’ s new?
By Caroline Knight Just like clothes, gardens are subject to changing fashions. Find out what’ s in, what’ s out and whether you could be a trendsetter.
Fashions come and go. But plant choices and fashions within gardens are a little different.
Plants advance thanks to human-directed evolution. Breeding desirable traits leads to new cultivars which expand the availability of positive features. This results in appealing attributes such as bigger and brighter blooms, improved disease resistance, stronger scent, better taste or yield or more robust climate resilience. The parent plants still exist, but the successful cultivars go on to be best sellers.
IN VOGUE This, together with new planting trends, has led to some older plant varieties falling out of fashion and entire genera being ignored. Take the naturalistic style, for example, which mimics nature. Plants fill the soil without gaps, with blooms appearing from early spring through to autumn. This planting style has seen a huge rise in popularity over the past few years and certain species adapt very well to the concept. They include ornamental grasses, perennials and biennials such as salvias, geums and foxgloves, and echinacea, perennial sunflowers and plants that were once viewed as weeds, including cow parsley and oxeye daisies.
This creates a great garden for pollinators but it means that some of the traditional garden favourites have fallen out of fashion, because they don’ t blend in with the loose, flowing design.
OXEYE DAISIES ARE FASHIONABLE