: Catherine Heatherington
: Seasonal Planting A Guide to Creating Year-Round Colour and Structure
: The Crowood Press
: 9780719843907
: 1
: CHF 20.10
:
: Garten
: English
: 176
: Wasserzeichen
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
Our gardens evolve in a constant cycle of emerging, flowering, retreating and renewal. Designing a garden in harmony with the seasons celebrates the aesthetics of each month, creating a garden that not only benefits the people and wildlife that inhabit it but nurtures the planet by encouraging biodiversity and climate-adaptive planting. In this book, Catherine Heatherington emphasises the need for observation and flexibility in designing our gardens by taking an ecological perspective on how to unite design principles with eco-friendly planting strategies. Using the timely and skilled advice in this book, you can discover how to design and plant your garden to offer successive shades of colour, texture, and form throughout the seasons and for many years to come.

Catherine Heatherington is a garden designer and consultant with a PhD from the University of Sheffield. She is the author of several books about landscape. Along with Alex Johnson, Catherine is a co-founder of DesignWild Associates, a design practice that integrates design with ecology to create exciting gardens that encourage wildlife into even the smallest of urban spaces.

CHAPTER 2

DESIGN PRINCIPLES AND CHANGE

Successional planting involves layering plants in a design with the aim of extending the flowering season, providing year-round interest, and creating moments of drama through change. The beauty of a garden is partly found in its impermanence, ephemerality and surprise, and at times of regrowth. We do not want to lose these signs of change by creating static gardens full of clipped evergreens and the techniques in this book always try to bear this in mind.

In later chapters, we will explore how different design techniques and planting palettes can provide seasonal interest. However, it is important not to forget the fundamental principles of good design, and here we examine how these can be used to embrace change through the seasons and the years. These are divided into two: general principles that apply to the design of the garden as a whole, and the principles that are associated with details such as flower and leaf shape. The chapter ends with a discussion about the unique challenges of designing small gardens and considers how these spaces can also be a source of unexpected delights throughout the year.

Embracing Change – the Fundamentals

Garden and landscape design is about sculpting space; it is fundamentally a three-dimensional challenge underpinned by time. This means that the design is never finished, is always changing, there is never a point at which you can say, ‘That’s it, this is the garden completed exactly as I imagined it.’ Some changes are predictable and cyclical, but others are unforeseen, depending on weather conditions, soils, competition, maintenance and so on. However, good design ensures that gardens can evolve with these changes and still retain their structure, drama, functionality and atmosphere.

When embracing change, it is important that the designer works with the garden owner, setting expectations and discussing the development and management of the garden from the outset. Designers should have sustainability at the forefront of their minds, and this can go hand in hand with a discussion about how the garden will evolve through the years.

Balance and Scale, Mass and Void

When considering balance in garden design the first elements to examine are the masses and the voids. Planting and built structures create the masses and open areas such as water, lawns, paths and patios are the voids; the balance, and also the tension, between these elements contributes to the atmosphere of a garden. A harmonious balance is easiest to achieve with a symmetrical design, but it is more interesting to experiment with the asymmetrical interplay of structural elements. Slopes, different heights and changes in level all affect the balance of the design, as does the density and visual strength of the masses and voids. It is useful to remember that ‘the garden is a maze in which people occupy the voids and the wildlife broadly speaking inhabits the masses’ (Heatherington and Johnson, 2022:p.44) and I will look at wildlife in relation to seasonal change inChapter 7.

Balancing elements in a design also requires an understanding of scale: the size of things relative to the surrounding landscape and human visitors to the garden. When designing the planting, it is important to think about the mood that it will create. If the scale is overpowering – if the masses predominate and tower over you – then the garden can feel claus