Product Description

Home gardeners with a keen interest in design, as well as professional landscape designers, will find invaluable advice in this new approach. The book focuses on the general principles behind creating successful and beautiful plant combinations in both time and space working with perennials in the context of trees, shrubs, and the surrounding landscape. The authors suggest looking across, into, and through the landscape. They ask the reader to consider the rhythms and connections in their designs, through such elements as echoes, linkages, and repetitions. More than just theory, Planting Design includes practical discussion of topics such as soil preparation, plant selection, and garden maintenance. Exceptional photographs show growth of a designed landscape over time, opening the gardener to new ways of seeing and thinking about their landscapes.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #122914 in Books
• Published on: 2005-11-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 176 pages

About the Author
About Piet Oudolf Piet Oudolf is a native of Holland and originally studied to be an architect. Instead of designing buildings he became the founder of New Wave planting, a movement which takes inspiration from nature but employs artistic skill in creating planting schemes. As a plantsman, his aim is to emphasize the form, texture, and natural harmony of plants, and as a skilled plant breeder, he creates new varieties for these and other specific design purposes. His style is the result of the influence of various horticultural traditions such as the combination of Dutch formality and naturalistic planting styles. Oudolf has designed gardens in Holland and Germany, and a public park in Sweden. In the UK , he has created a much-publicized garden in Hampshire and is about to embark on a wildlife park in Norfolk. His own garden and nursery, opened with his wife in 1982 near Arnhem, Holland, has become world-famous. It has appeared in magazines such as Gardens Illustrated, House and Garden, The Independent, Perspectives, and Maire Claire Maison. Oudolf is also the subject of a chapter in Page Dickey's book, Breaking Ground, which profiles ten of the world's foremost contemporary garden designers. He collaborated with garden designer Arne Maynard to create the garden showpiece "Evolution", which was awarded the illustrious Best in Show and a gold medal at the Chelsea Flower Show 2000. Oudolf also partnered in 2000 with Kathryn Gustafson's design team from Seattle, WA to win the design competition for the monumental Millenium Garden, the new focal point for the heart of Chicago. About Noel Kingsbury Noël Kingsbury is a leading expert in contemporary naturalistic planting design. He contributes regularly to Hortus, Homes and Gardens, The English Garden, and the Royal Horticultural Society's magazine, The Garden. He occasionally writes pieces for other magazines and newspapers including Financial Times and Country Life. Noël lectures regularly in the United States at places such as the Seattle Flower Show, the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, and the Rochester Civic Garden Center. Noël is a well-known writer on plants and gardens. He has always been firmly in the vanguard of new developments, playing a major role in popularizing a more naturalistic and sustainable planting style. He wrote Designing with Plants with designer Piet Oudolf and is associated with the Landscape Department at the University of Sheffield as part of his active involvement in promoting quality planting in public spaces. A lover of wild spaces and wildflowers growing in their natural environment, Noël emphasizes growing gardens in a way that expresses this passion. He is especially fond of the way plants group naturally when left to their own devices. Noël loves discovering good examples of large-scale, natural-style gardens or plantings that clearly evoke nature. He is pleased to be part of the naturalistic planting movement and believes that "Gardening for myself and for a lot of people is an opportunity to be close to nature."

Customer Reviews

Disappointed, incredibly disappointed.
I would describe myself as a fan of Oudolf – by adopting and adapting some of his raison-être our own garden has changed beyond recognition, with masses of seasonal interest throughout the year. Kingsbury ghosted Oudolf’s original work, Designing with Plants with some aplomb, Henk Gerritsen’s turn of phrase in Dream Plants and More Dream Plants was always light, witty and insightful and while Gardening with Grasses seemed to bow to certain conventionalities, for European readers, the book opened up new vistas of possibilities. But with this offering the writers have run out of steam, or rather Kingsbury has as Oudolf appears to have participated little in the book’s creation. This time Kingsbury’s style is leaden – is the book a re-working of his recent thesis? It stinks of academia. Timber Press has done an excellent job re the images on the hard and dust cover (and this time all the pages are in the right order and the captions are all in English – not the case with my copies of previous work attributed to Oudolf that they have published). But as publishers they mislead in their suggestion that in this book ‘home gardeners … will find invaluable advice in this new approach’. First of all the approach is not new, secondly the style is so leaden most would start to doze while reading it and thirdly not all home gardeners have the opportunity for creating public amenities for their community. For professionals the book may be of use but, as another reviewer has suggested, the narrative raises more questions than it answers, and the lists are short and somewhat mean.
Next time Oudolf’s name appears on the cover of a new book I will wait until I get my hands on a copy so see what, if anything, is new and inspirational. In the meanwhile I will continue to use my dog-eared copies of previous work attributed to him which are well worth purchasing.

Planting Design - Gardens in Time and Space
This book raises more questions than it answers.

It says that planners of public open spaces and parks are reluctant to use perennial plantings because of concerns about durability and maintenance. The general gardening public is also ill-informed about how individual species compete, spread and how long they will survive in their gardens as this information is never provided by garden centres and retailers. Yet the book singularly fails to provide the answers needed to build confidence in the form of intermingled naturalistic perennial plantings favoured by the authors.

Maybe the answers are not yet entirely known and we must wait the outcome of Noel Kingsbury's ongoing research. However, `Planting Design – gardens in time and space' has extended the debate about the reslience and longevity of naturalistic plantings and will have avid Piet Oudolf and Noel Kingsbury fans craving for more in a future sequel.

A great attempt with an emphasis on the horticultural aspect of Planting Design
There are three main factors to consider in Planting Design: aesthetics, horticulture, and symbolism of plants.

"Gardeners and garden designers seek inspiration from a variety of sources. Among these, nature is perhaps a relative recent choice, a reflection of changing attitudes toward natural world..." Piet Oudolf and Noel Kingsbury wrote. They continued to cover nature and gardens (use of plants with wild character, nature-inspired planting pattern, use of native species, avoiding formality, biodiversity, etc), ecology and habitat (ecological fit, visual ecology, etc), planting in space, plants on display, the mechanics of planting design, planting in time, and practicalities (soil preparation, plant selection, etc) and maintenance.

Planting Design is the most important aspect of landscape education and practice. It is also a subject that is very difficult to teach or to learn. "Planting Design: Gardens in Time and Space" can alleviate this problem. We need people to do research on Planting Design from different angles. Piet Oudolf is an innovative designer, horticulturist and plantsman, and Noel Kingsbury is an advocate of naturalistic planting. "Planting Design: Gardens in Time and Space" is a result of their cooperation. It has 176 pages and many spectacular color interior photos. It is a great attempt with an emphasis on the horticultural aspect of Planting Design.

Gang Chen, Author of "LEED AP Exam Guide" & "Planting Design Illustrated." LEED AP, AIA