Right Plant, Right Place

Welcome to our five part blog series; Right Design, right place.

You’ve all heard the phrase ‘right plant, right place’ well this applies to all sorts of design aspects so, in a play on words we thought we would pick some key design aspects and write a series of short blogs exploring their use in our design work. Starting with of course;

Right plant, right place.

We all have our preferences when it comes to plants. We all know the style of garden we would like and whether it’s a foxglove or a fern that we are most drawn to. What we are beginning to understand about this now is that our affinity with plants stems from our childhood. We are much more likely to crave and enjoy now, environments which brought us pleasure as a child and this includes the natural world. Increasing research is beginning to emerge about the link between memory of nature as children and our connection to it as adults, so it follows perhaps that our plant choices too could begin there. Certainly, much of the health work we do here at Studio 31 stems around this idea that greater engagement with a space and improvements to wellbeing are often seen when a person is more familiar with the plants, materials and environments therein.

Plants need many things to flourish; a combination of the right soil, light, temperature, moisture and pH as well as things like shelter and of course the right context and character of a place. There was a trend back in the 1970s to bring in new soil to change the environment people wanted to grow in and thus hopefully create optimal conditions for your favourite species. Developing science into soils over the intervening years has seen that long term it is unlikely that this strategy will yield the results you hoped for. Our experience has found that, in fact, it is possible to achieve the look (and better) that you hoped for by choosing plants which suit the environment rather than changing the environment to suit the plant.

An example of this is the dry garden that Beth Chatto is now renowned for. The conditions of this garden (which was once a car park) were such that nothing else would grow and the low rainfall meant she had to adapt her original strategy to planting. By embracing the conditions she was presented with, she created one of the most interesting and unique gardens in the UK and is held as both an industry exemplar and extraordinary plantswoman by peers and academics alike.

Often people feel that it is their poor skill at gardening or just a particular plant that “they can’t get on with” but that age-old adage “if you ask a fish to climb a tree…” comes to mind. It isn’t you and it isn’t the plants, it’s the environment. A good designer will know this and will have the horticultural knowledge to specify plants that will not only achieve the look and feel you desire but will also flourish and complement the architecture and wider setting.

The diversity of the natural world is such that you can almost always find a plant to suit the end goal and what you might find is that if you let it, your garden (and your designer) might surprise you.

Photo credit Andrei Slobtsov