A plant shape primer: for the design-impaired, here's how to combine spikes, blobs, pools, and mists effectively in the garden

摘要

I am not very good at designing a garden in my head. I have to get in there and dig up this thing and switch it with that, put in some more of these and rip out half of those, then stand back and observe the results. This kind of experimentation maybe fine if you are dealing with petunias and marigolds, but if one of the plants you are juggling is a Rosa alba 'Semiplena' as big as a Volkswagen, it all gets a bit tiring, not to mention expensive and hard on the plants. Plant shapes give me particular trouble. I am always putting things next to each other, then deciding they look awful together. A few years ago I joined my friend, garden writer Nancy McDonald who does not share my visualization handicap-in coming up with a system of horticulturalgeometry that reduces all possible plant shapes to four basic groups--spikes, blobs, pools, and mists--and suggests ways of combining the shapes for maximum visual pleasure. A few plants that didn't readily fit into any of the shape categories we groupedunder the headings "messes," "surprises," and "dandelions"--these special cases are discussed together after the descriptions of plant shapes.