It's getting late in the gardening year and my garden still has some big holes where I ripped out plants early in the season. I've spent the better part of the summer trying to decided how to reconstruct those areas with no definite conclusion. I can look at the garden and easily point to the areas that work and those that are not successful. But putting it all into words can often be difficult — and, for me, it is with words that the solution to such garden dilemmas begin.
Linden Hawthorne (what a great name for a garden designer) has a vocabulary designed to solve this problem. I discovered Hawthorne and her book, "Gardening with Shape, Line and Texture: A Plant Design Sourcebook," on the Timber Press website. Luckily the public library had a copy on their new book shelf. Hawthorne looks at over 800 plants based on their design characteristics. These characteristics are how I typically try to combine plants in my garden, but it's usually been a subliminal process. Hawthorne has given me a language to make the process easier.
She considers gardens an art form where you "paint with plants," which she divides into five categories: horizontals and tiers, verticals and diagonals, arcs and fountains, clumps and mounds, and clouds and transparencies. When I looked at the plants in each group I could immediately see that my garden has twice the number of clump formers as clouds. Tiers and verticals are neck-and-neck but still significantly behind clumps. Using Hawthorne's terms it is easy to see what I've unconsciously felt the garden was lacking. It's gardening, not math, so I won't be trying to even up the numbers — just leaven all those earth-bound clumps!
You can get a good sense of Hawthorne's book and her concept here — as well as seeing lots of helpful images.
Years ago I went to a series of anatomy lectures by Robert Beverly Hale; he always used to say "you can't draw it unless you know it's there". In a similar way, it sounds like Hawthorne, by naming and describing plant shapes, is making visible and useful what was unseen, or at least not taken into account. I love her concept; thanks for bringing it to our attention.
Posted by: Altoon | Monday, September 20, 2010 at 04:54 PM
Sounds like a good book to add to the library.
Your comment about Linden Hawthorne brought to mind Flora Grubb of California. How could they have grown up to be anything but plant people?
In Austin there's a well-known urologist (who performs vasectomies) named Dr. Richard Chopp. Yes, he goes by Dick. True story.
Posted by: Pam/Digging | Wednesday, September 22, 2010 at 03:56 PM