Tip of the Week: Use Seasonal Walk as Design Teaching Tool
Posted in Gardening Tips on September 21st, 2009 by Sonia Uyterhoeven – Be the first to comment |
Sonia Uyterhoeven is Gardener for Public Education. Join her each weekend for home gardening demonstrations on a variety of topics in the Home Gardening Center. |
Traditionally, Seasonal Walk at The New York Botanical Garden has been a display of annuals, which kicked off with a massive colorful showing of tulips in spring and reached a crescendo in the summer with an imaginative arrangement of summer tropicals. The season closed with an autumnal mix of mums (Chrysanthemum) and ornamental cabbages (Brassica spp.).
For this year’s Seasonal Walk, the renowned Dutch designers Piet Oudolf and Jacqueline van der Kloet were invited to create a display that drew upon their areas of expertise: perennials, ornamental grasses, and bulbs. The result has been a transformation of the annual border into a multi-seasonal herbaceous paradise. Following, we explore some of the lessons that a design project of this scope has to offer the home gardener.
One feature that is immediately recognizable in the border is the intermingling of permanent and ephemeral plant masses. Perennials are skillfully placed in drifts that flow through the border. They hold the space in the spring as they slowly emerge and fill out until they are cut back as late as possible at the end of the season. They form the structural component in the border.
Tucked in the perennial drifts are irregular shapes that have been left open for the more ephemeral displays—tulips in the spring and annuals and tender bulbs in the summer. While these areas have irregular shapes—they are referred to as batwings and peanuts based on their form— the same shapes are repeated throughout the border, giving a sense of continuity that is important in any good design. read more »