Digging In: Plant Selection

By Jennifer Smith

When it comes to plants and books about plants, I have little willpower to resist. And for that, I am thankful. If I had any self-control, I wouldn’t be thumbing through Dream Plants for the Natural Garden which features 1,200 beautiful and reliable plants for the natural garden by Piet Oudolf and Henk Gerritsen. Piet Oudolf is a Dutch garden designer, nurseryman, photographer and writer who inspired and embodies, the New Perennial Movement. If you’ve happened upon the Lurie Garden in Chicago, Battery Park and The High Line in New York City, or his garden on Belle Island in Detroit,  you saw how he masterfully arranges plants in drifts, blocks or in a matrix style to create naturalistic gardens that transition effortlessly through the seasons.  It’s a pleasure and a true learning experience to be able to study his gardens in person.

When we look at our home landscape, we begin to wonder how we can take inspiration from such lushly planted, generously sized gardens and pare it down to our front yard garden. It’s a daunting task for many. The complexity of design coupled with the incredible plant variety in his gardens can be difficult to translate to the home garden. Plant availability, as illustrated in the book, or a trip to the local garden center, may be a bit overwhelming. But it need not be.

Our goal when selecting plants is to have something in bloom from the first hints of spring when snow still rests in the garden to the first hard frost of winter. We want different shapes and forms, we want movement in the garden and plants that look good in the winter.  That’s a lot of boxes to check, but you can accomplish this with just a handful of plants.  Begin with a plant chart, which includes a column for each season, a column to note the bloom color, a column to record the shape (upright, creeping, weeping, tall, short), finally adding a column for winter interest: those plants that look great standing through winter.  

When you take a closer look at plantings by designers like Piet Oudolf, Kelly Norris and Thomas Rainer, you’ll see it’s the grasses that pull the designs together. Grasses hide bare stems in the fall and winter and lend a softness to a garden that can look harsh when the blooms are spent, while adding movement as they sway in the breeze.  Be generous with the number of grasses you use.  If your garden is such that you can add a lot of height, consider taller grasses like Karl Foerster or Shenandoah Switch grass. For shorter plantings, consider Little Bluestem, Prairie Dropseed, and if you don’t mind a garden with a tousled look, Sideoats Grama grass. You don’t need a wide variety of grasses, just multiples of two different grasses.

Selecting perennials is another task. The selection is so vast that I can’t tell you what to plant, there’s simply too many options.  When I see a plant I like, in person, online or in a book, I add it to my list, checking the appropriate character boxes as I go. As you can imagine, over time you plant chart can become quite extensive.  When it’s time to make selections for a particular garden, it may be easiest to start with bloom time. What would work well, from your list, as an early spring bloomer? Then pull from your list plants for early summer, summer and late fall blooming. You still may have too many plants under consideration for the new garden, but you can edit the list by highlighting contrasting bloom color as well as form. Finally, look at your list to see that you have plants to accompany your grasses through winter.  

If this is feeling like a lot, don’t worry. Your garden does not have to be perfectly planted on day one. The garden will tell you what’s missing: color here, something blooming now, a new shape to contrast with what you’ve already planted. If the garden is lacking cohesion, or a feature to pull it together, the easiest solution may be adding more of the grasses you already have. The winter garden will also offer you design advice. In the winter we see where exposed, rough looking stems, such as those of echinacea would benefit from the softening presence of grasses.  

Garden design is a process. Even perfectly planned gardens will need tweaking, it’s the nature of gardening: Nothing remains the same for too long. Luckily, you’ll have your chart to help you make your next plant selection.

Jennifer Smith is an award-winning pollinator garden designer with Wimberg Landscaping.