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Introduction Perennial Meadows
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Category Archives: Perennial Meadows series
Summer, Perennials and Thoughts on Maintenance
Designing mixed perennial meadow plantings is all about choosing plants that work together well over an extended period of time by uniting into a living community where each has a part to play. Books will tell you that such plantings are … Continue reading
Posted in Perennial Meadows series
Tagged garden design, Garden maintenance, grasses, matrix planting, naturalistic planting, planting design, Shrubs
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Community Planting
Here is the small border at the entrance to my trial gardens in Amsterdam. It has been the same for more than ten years and requires less than an hours maintenance per year. Plants live together in communities sharing the … Continue reading
Looking good after 6 years – one perennial meadow example – 2015
Six years ago I planted eleven demonstration borders at Lianne’s Siergrassen; a nursery specialised in ornamental grasses, in the north of the Netherlands. I returned this month after a three year gap to see how they were faring and came … Continue reading
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Tagged complementary plants, grasses, matrix planting, Perennial Meadows, theme plants
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Form and Structure within Perennial Planting Design
Perennials are by their very nature loose and informal especially when combined into contemporary naturalistic planting schemes. The traditional herbaceous border was created as a tableaux to be viewed from outside and was given structure by being given a framework … Continue reading
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Tagged grasses, Perennial Meadows, planting design
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Experimental Perennial Plantings
It is in my two trial gardens in Amsterdam that I have developed my ideas of the creation of perennial meadows. This is one of two long thin borders in which many ideas have been investigated. Together they are 12 … Continue reading
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Tagged naturalistic planting, plant repetition, planting design
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A New Perennial Meadow Planting Scheme for Christmas
There is a small perennial border in the centre of my garden where for many years I grew a random mixture of plants – all interesting, but as a whole chaotic. Finally, I have decided to bring order and a … Continue reading
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Tagged complementary plants, garden design, Perennial Meadows, planting design, theme plants
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Success with Perennials – Establishment and Maintenance of Planting Schemes
It is now three years since I planted nine separate perennial meadows to illustrate my eBooks and they are looking fantastic. In fact they looked good in the first year, but now we can begin to see just how successful … Continue reading
Perennial Meadows – Bringing structure, focus and impact to perennial planting schemes.
To generalise, perennial plants are soft, loose, frothy and amorphous when we compare them with trees and shrubs and especially so when we clip trees and shrubs into shapes and hedges. When designing gardens we are told to start with … Continue reading
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Tagged garden design, planting design
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Perennial Meadows – Plant driven design.
The plants you include in a garden will surely influence its design – well, yes and no. In the Netherlands the native flora and different ecological habitats are celebrated in a network of so-called heemparks or native plant parks. These … Continue reading
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Tagged garden design, planting design
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Perennial Meadows – Ideas and expression within planting design.
Is colour enough? No, in a word. Of course it is the first thing we see when looking at planting schemes and it can strongly influence their impact, but colour alone is only a small part of the challenge of … Continue reading