Naturalistic planting layout

Hillside in Spring: Naturalistic Planting Layout

Underpinning your planting plan with well-considered structural and repeated elements, and putting as much thought into how you will use foliage as you do for flowers, is key to an effective planting that will work well all year round.

Repeat Planting to Create Rhythm

When you're assembling any plant list, it's important to have a number of plants that you can repeat within the planting. This provides continuity, a sense of calm, and rhythm in the planting.

• At the edge of the garden for instance, I'm using a Deschampsia to run along the front.
• Then I pick up a different rhythm with repeating plants that emerge above the Deschampsia, such as Sanguisorba 'Cangshan Cranberry', which will be 2.5m tall by early summer.

These changes in layer and texture, and sometimes a quite extreme juxtaposition of different heights, give a real excitement to the planting.

Punctuating the Rhythm with New Focal Points of Interest

Amongst those key players that provide continuity and the foundations for everything else, you can find treasures that provide focal points of interest.

• In the understorey, I've got little pools of a lovely pink primrose that lights up the spring when it flowers, but is then happy to drop away and sit in the shade.
• Then I've got Thalictrum 'Black Stockings', which appears as a punctuation to rise above the other plants and provide something new for your eye to fall on.

So the rhythms change throughout the planting. They are able to do so because I use those plants that repeat to provide a foundation and a sense of structure, amongst which other things can sit.

Structure Underpinning the Naturalistic Design

When planning this garden, I made a wish-list of the things I wanted to use in the garden, which I then pruned back to the things I knew should be here.

• I cut the plant list down so it didn't feel over-cluttered: that allowed me to have a number of plants that repeat and provide continuity, plus some that appear as special moments.

When setting the garden out, I put in some key players to help the transition from area to area.

• These willows, Salix 'Nancy Saunders', bookend the space, with planting areas between them.
• I've got other emergent plants, such as the Rosa glauca, and more willows in front, which provide further structure within the planting.

So although this area looks very informal, and it's meant to because its naturalistic planting, there are various systems that underpin what you see. Following these principles will help you to decide:

• What goes into your planting mix,
• Where the different plants go,
• The ideal percentages of the different plants within the mix,
• How you're going to cover the course of a year with things of interest,
• And most importantly, how the plants will sit comfortably alongside each other.

Creating a 'Green Tapestry' with Your Planting

Use Crossover Plants and Draw Inspiration from the Landscape to Smoothly Transition Between Areas

On the edge of the garden, where I want an easy transition from the ornamental garden to the meadows beyond, I'm using certain plants that have a crossover feeling.

• For example, the pink cow parsley, Chaerophyllum hirsutum 'Roseum', flowers at the same time as the wild cow parsley in the hedgerows, which creates a lovely connection with the landscape.
• Similarly, the Deschampsia at the edge of the garden is a variety of the Deschampsia cespitosa that you can find in woodlands in the UK and across much of the northern hemisphere.

As you step down from the centre of the garden and transition out to the wilder parts, you begin to see these crossover plants and start to feel that connection to the wider landscape.

Foliage Colours and Textures Can Be Just as Important and Effective as Flowers

For me, what underpins the floriferous layer that comes later is just as important. When putting a plant list together, think about this early part of the year when you get this first flush of foliage, and how you can create interest using different foliage forms and textures.

Underpinning Your Planting with a 'Green Tapestry'

Beth Chatto described this as a 'green tapestry' – a fitting description, because a tapestry is all about attention to detail, and many layers coming together to create something made by the sum of all its parts. That's what the garden is at the moment. We've got fantastic different leaf tones and shapes:

• The blue-grey of the Sanguisorba,
• The lovely olive green of the Deschampsia,
• Thalictrum 'Elin' flushing a purple-grey.

Evergreens carry that underpinning role on through the winter when everything else dies back.

Planting with a 30 cm Spacing

When designing a perennial planting, I usually work on the principle that everything goes in about 30 cm apart – which is really quite close.

• Of course, the 30 cm rule between perennials is a rule that you have to break sometimes, because certain plants will take up more space than others.
• But other plants can be tucked underneath those, so you get back to that rule really working.

The 30 cm spacing is a rule of thumb that gives you a system to work out your plant numbers, and then you apply more specific rules for individual plants once you're laying out your planting plans.

Plant Directory

Deschampsia cespitosa

Sanguisorba 'Cangshan Cranberry'

Thalictrum 'Black Stockings'

Salix 'Nancy Saunders'

Rosa glauca

Chaerophyllum hirsutum 'Roseum'

Camassia

Thalictrum 'Elin'

Leucojum

Further Reading

You can read more about how my planting schemes at Hillside work throughout the seasons, and my favourite plants for layering to give year-round interest, in my book Natural Selection: A year in the Garden.