Thinking ahead

Design plant communities

Rather than just choosing plants you think look good together (which is, let’s face it, hard enough in itself), the idea here is to design a garden inspired by natural plant communities. This involves selecting plants that not only enjoy the same conditions, but which won’t outcompete each other, and inhabit a variety of ecological niches both above and below ground so that the resultant planting is to some extent self-maintaining, or requires minimal human interference to maintain.

There might, for example, be a colourful carpet of spring-flowering bulbs or low, shade-tolerant perennials, interplanted with a whole range of early-summer-flowering perennials that seasonally swallow up the former. Then there might be an even later and taller layer of flowering perennials, chosen for their form and foliage, so that they flower above, but don’t shade out, the earlier-flowering plants.

This design approach potentially has many benefits, but the most evident is the ability to achieve the biggest and most seasonally dynamic floral impact from the always limited and ever-diminishing resources assigned to maintaining our public spaces. But it’s an approach that’s just as appropriate for the home gardener.

Biodiversity-driven design

The value of biodiversity in gardens has been so thoroughly embraced it’s easy to forget just how recently it entered our thinking. Only 15–20 years ago, entomologists considered gardens to be largely ‘sterile’ locations, and in some cases, with gardeners waging war on every insect that appeared in their garden, they actually were. Meanwhile, for those of us who have never, out of conscience or simple laziness, sprayed an insecticide, gardens have relatively recently been discovered to be spectacularly biodiverse, when compared even to surrounding countryside. The two garden features that most boost biodiversity are a pond and a compost heap, but simply making sure your planting is as diverse as possible (and, ideally, making it different from your neighbour’s) will go a long way towards maximising the range of birds, reptiles, invertebrates, fungi, bacteria and soil organisms that it hosts.

Header image by Michael McCoy