Planting: A New Perspective

Piet Oudolf and Noel Kingsbury are the leading international exponents of sustainable planting design. They are also nurserymen with decades worth of knowledge about plants and their habits. This book offers keen gardeners, garden designers and landscape architects a unique insight into how they combine these areas of expertise to create some of the world's most memorable parks and gardens. They then demonstrate how this effect can be achieved on a smaller scale in domestic garden settings.

“"You could get lost in the landscapes featured in this book. Oudolf and Kingsbury explain how to combine long-lived perennials and woody landscape plants to create gardens that mimic nature and provide interest year-round. Study it and you'll be one step closer to designing your own tumbling, flopping, blooming-meadow-inspired border of flowers, shrubs and grasses."”

'The pictures are superb ( - ) I recommend this book to every thoughtful gardener' (The Financial Times)

Piet Oudolf is a garden designer and plantsman, based in the Netherlands but working and teaching internationally. He has recently been awarded an honorary fellowship by the Royal Institute of British Architects. Noel Kingsbury is one of the UK's leading experts on naturalistic planting. 'Planting: A New Perspective,' is their third collaboration.

Piet Oudolf's gardens are breathtaking to observe and hard to define. They are calm yet full of surprises, apparently effortless but complex to achieve, and intimate while reaching out to the wider natural world. His unique combinations of long-lived perennials and woody plants are rich in texture, sophisticated in colour, and have an emotional resonance that humans find compelling. Oudolf's skill in combining plants is legendary and in his recent work he takes it to a new level, favouring highly integrated schemes in which plants intermingle and blend without overcrowding one another. An intimate knowledge of plants is essential to the success of this approach and here, Piet Oudolf and Noel Kingsbury share their considerable understanding of plant ecology and performance - how plants behave in different situations, what goes on underground, which species make good neighbours. From them we learn how to select the right plants, how to group them, and how to combine them with other elements to make beautiful gardens that require minimal use of resources. With the help of Oudolf's original planting plans, this book is the first to show gardeners and professionals explicitly how his gardens and landscapes are made. A detailed directory that records vital information about each plant such as its life expectancy, the persistence of its seedheads, its tendency to spread, and propensity to self seed will prove an invaluable resource. A Piet Oudolf garden feels right on many different levels

This item is eligible for free returns within 30 days of delivery. See our returns policy for further details.