Courtesy of Prolandscaper magazine. Photographs courtesy of Charles Hawes.
I’m very grateful to Andrew Wilson and ProLandscaper Magazine for letting us use this piece. I would really like to know just what people are wanting and expecting from Andrew’s talks on garden design. And I hope you’re going to tell us?
And a small personal request. Would you vote for Veddw if you know the garden and feel happy to? It could help enormously: we’re up against those big, famous gardens with many full time gardeners, mega publicity and no weeds……Thank you!
Any questions? by Andrew Wilson
Andrew Wilson looks at the preconceptions of his many and varied audiences on the subject of garden design and planting. What do people want?
Apart from my regular teaching at LCGD, I am often invited to speak at various events or for a wide range of organisations, some amateur and some professional. In general, I talk about garden design, it is my specialist subject although there are many variations within that over-arching title.
Although some groups surprise me in a good way, the majority of people who come to listen to a garden design talk are actually just interested in the planting. The surprises come from the horticultural groups, perhaps because I come as welcome change to full on planting information. They are often fascinated by the design thinking, concepts and built structure into which the planting is introduced.
As much as I love planting design I have to accept that as a garden designer it is a part of a bigger picture and cannot take up all of my time when creating a garden. This understanding is not generally shared by people outside the garden design fraternity. In percentage terms perhaps no more than 20% of a typical project is planting focussed. For my wider audiences outside the college perhaps 80% of their garden thinking is planting focussed, revealing a substantial disconnect in what people are looking for or expecting.
I can speak very happily about plants and planting design but if I am invited to talk about garden design that emphasis has to change. So, if a course or a lecture on garden design fills with an enthusiastic audience have they misunderstood the subject?
My sense is that most audiences are mixed in their needs. Some will have an empty space and will be starting from scratch – this group probably needs a complete understanding of a designer’s approach, not just so that they might use a designer but also so that they can create a successful end result. Others will have a complete garden already with a few things they want to change – for this group their need is probably more concerned with planting. It is also unlikely that they will want to undo everything they have already done.
In a lecture recently, having talked about a range of gardens that Gavin and I have designed I was asked what I would do about sustainable planting for country gardens as opposed to filling gardens with plastic and artificial materials? No gardens that I had introduced used artificial or plastic materials and approximately half of the gardens I showed were sustainably planted country gardens.
Graffiti on Andrew’s wall.
I have regular comments about the planting being the all important thing when my workload as a designer tells me it is not. There is also a frequent unwillingness in audiences to think outside their own garden situation. I was recently asked why I didn’t just talk about normal planting – not as a criticism but as a suggestion of need. I asked the questioner what he actually meant by normal as soil type, micro climate, drainage and so on can have a substantial impact on what and how we plant. We were talking at the time about the long hot and dry spring and early summer and the effect of climate change on our thinking.
I wonder why people would come to sit through a lecture on “normal” anything or why people might come to a design lecture when all they want to see is what they have already. I have always tried to inspire, to interpret ideas and explain possibilities – it’s what my students comment on in their course reviews.
So, perhaps I need to be more normal, more typical, more plant orientated and more matter of fact?
NOT!
Andrew Wilson
I don’t find this an issue with garden design clients here in the San Francisco Bay Area. Of course there are always plenty of landscape architects and designers who are very well known and published who seemingly place very little emphasis on plants, and are known for their minimalist approach. I suspect they also don’t really know much about plants. There is certainly a very large contingent of designers and gardening public who appreciate both hardscape/creating meaningful outdoor spaces as well as interesting/innovative plantings. I think of masters such as Roberto Burle Marx as a perfect blend.
I also think it is a different world in a Mediterranean/subtropical/tropical climate as gardens have greater use as year-round outdoor rooms and the planting possibilities are both more broad yet with limitations of needing to get by with less; less supplemental water and less flammability in our regular seasonal wildfire season.
I love emphasizing plantings as being the mutable change in the garden over time, and the ability to encourage interaction with nature. Hardscape doesn’t provoke the same attention or creation of empathy and care that plantings do. A garden is not just one thing, and a talk will always attract those who don’t take to one’s approach. The best response is probably humor, but sometimes I have to bite my tongue when commentary seems particularly inane.
I wonder where Piet Oudolf figures in this? When I think of his designs I realise I think of planting plans. And when I think of Hauser & Wirth in Somerset, (or maybe, different design and designers, Trentham Gardens) I think of plants and planting. Are these gardens feeding a preoccupation, even obsession, with planting? (and flat gardens?!)
Feeding an obsession with planting? That is ridiculous. Piet started out designing every aspect of a garden, oh so many years ago. But plants were his passion, so he started to grow what he needed … and then sell them. Piet now, is crystal clear about what he does – he paints with plants in a way that takes one’s breath away. His depth of knowledge regarding plants is better than Google. So yeah, he is a plant guy, and doesn’t particularly want to focus on anything else. He has certainly earned that right. Landscape architecture is alive and well, but is best served, when there is a strong and successful marriage between the structures and hardscapes AND the plantings. There aren’t too many professionals who are gifted and successful in all these arenas, so collaboration is the perfect solution. And seriously, who cares if there is a current preoccupation with planting ?!? How refreshing, enlightening and ecologically appropriate in these challenging times!
Seems to me that Andrew is pretty much on the mark. He, like me, was trained as a landscape architect and for that reason ‘Space’ is ever the driving element. What a lot of garden designers and ‘gardeners’ forget is that planting also controls space in massing and grouping. If the spaces don’t work nothing works at all, planting will never “pull it round!”
I was taught by Ben Jacobsen who was one of the very best Scandinavian Landscape Architects, full of sense and sound advice.
I don’t know what people want or expect from Andrew Wilson’s talks but I can offer my thoughts on what people want from the talks I give on a variety of topics, all related in one way or another to garden design. The word I hear most often after a talk is ‘inspirational’ or some variation on that theme. This suggests to me that people want to be taken out of their ruts, whether the rut is in their own thinking or in the subjects covered most often at horticultural groups. Plants are secondary features in all my talks, used to illustrate a particular point. The most boring talks for me are those that go through lists of plants giving information readily available on line.
indeed…my plant work load is barely 5% of my time now. I sigh when I have some bright young thing asking me to mentor her (usually a her) because she wants to ‘take up’ garden design because she absolutely adores plants and gardening.
I gently introduce her to a world of briefing notes, surveys, feasibility appraisals, site plans, visits to quarries, liaising with clients, suppliers, and contractors, planning permissions, method statements, dozens of emails about the above…and we might visit a nursery or see a garden planted the previous year.
Once their soul is crushed…they may decide to get a ‘proper’ job. It’s one way to reduce the competition I suppose…..
Oh the next time your going to a quarry and a contractor with a big digger, can I come please..( At the moment my two fav. plants are ‘Pinks’ & Dechamsia grass) For stone and gravel gardens.
sure thing Bill…I live just below the Ham Hill quarries and the lias quarries near Aller are not far away…or we could take a trip to Portland Bill….lots of good stone in the South West – let’s go…