Plant Talk

Inside The New York Botanical Garden

Dan Pearson

Tip of the Week: Designs that Draw You Into Nature

Posted in Gardening Tips, People on February 22 2010, by Sonia Uyterhoeven

Sonia Uyterhoeven is Gardener for Public Education.

Last week we looked at how Dan Pearson transformed landscapes through his naturalistic vision and his skill as a designer. Today I’ll detail some of his practices that you can use in your garden.

When Pearson was young he would observe plants in the wild, studying where they grew and the patterns and associations they formed with other plants. As a result, his planting style is never rigid, and plants form loose and successful partnerships with one another.

Gardens are rarely just a healthy conglomerate of plants. In a discussion of hardscapes during his lecture, Pearson said to think of gardens as needing “good bone structure.” The walls and other structures in the garden are meant to be recessive, fading into the background and offering support for the dynamic plant palette; they frame the space.

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Tip of the Week: Dan Pearson Creates Visual Wonderlands

Posted in Gardening Tips, People on February 16 2010, by Sonia Uyterhoeven

Sonia Uyterhoeven is Gardener for Public Education.

Just like Beethoven took ordinary musical notes and elevated them through simple and complex melodies into his immortal symphonies, the well-known British landscape designer Dan Pearson (right) has the ability to transform space into visual wonderlands.

Pearson was at the Garden last month for the first of three lectures in the series From the Ground Up: Gardens Re-Imagined. He presented Into the Wild, an exploration into his natural landscapes.

I was prepared for a talk on how a talented designer re-creates the artifact of nature on his project sites—not as nature would herself but as an artist reinterpreting and reconfiguring nature’s portrait. This point was certainly made and beautifully illustrated.

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