I once wondered the very same thing. After years of experimenting in my own northern perennial garden and getting to know some of the plants and people leading the charge, I became seriously inspired to find a way.
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The naturalistic ethos is about creating a multi-purpose garden with the amplitude to feed the soul and nurture local biodiversity. It seeks to minimize typical garden inputs like pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers, while recycling its outputs from rainwater to garden waste, all in the name of self-sustainability.
Ecologically speaking, the natural garden is adaptable to almost any kind of ecosystem; a core principle is to group plants together by common habitat, be it woodland, prairie, wetland or steppe. A smaller garden is more like a micro-habitat, where everything starts with the setting itself. The more you know about your existing site and its conditions (light, soil, pH, moisture, hardiness zone, etc.), the more successful your future design and planting decisions will be.
The current fascination with naturalistic style can be traced in part to the rise of the so-called New Perennial movement in planting design. This movement originated over 30 years ago in the Netherlands as an iconoclastic group of designers, plantsfolk, artists, and philosophers with Piet Oudolf emerging as its leading figure.
The goal is to free the mind to think in the abstract when combining plants and to aim for a variety of shapes and effects in the course of one planting area. It may also gently steer the gardener away from the temptation to plant one of this and one of that with no sense of connection.
In a typical home garden, there are generally four or five layers to consider when assembling a plant list and creating a naturalistic planting design. This image of my former uncottage garden reveals the principle at work in an open sunny raised bed.
The layers are planted to knit closely together to cover any open ground, suppress weeds and support invertebrate life. The ideal is to create contrast with a mix of coarse and fine foliage in the layers. Even in a small garden, go for size and scale; too many small plants can read as fussy.
To naturalize an existing garden, you can start off slowly. Simply change up your maintenance regime to influence the look of your plantings. Leave seed heads to form instead of deadheading. Rather than cut everything back in the fall, let plants stand for the winter and enjoy their silhouettes.
On a smaller scale, the plantings can become parts of a stage set. Try to repeat theme plants and combinations to link one part to another. Pay special attention to how natural light moves through the garden space to illuminate the plantings.
A botanical garden or botanic garden[nb 1] is a garden with a documented collection of living plants for the purpose of scientific research, conservation, display, and education.[1] Typically plants are labelled with their botanical names. It may contain specialist plant collections such as cacti and other succulent plants, herb gardens, plants from particular parts of the world, and so on; there may be greenhouses, shadehouses, again with special collections such as tropical plants, alpine plants, or other exotic plants. Most are at least partly open to the public, and may offer guided tours, educational displays, art exhibitions, book rooms, open-air theatrical and musical performances, and other entertainment.
Botanical gardens are often run by universities or other scientific research organizations, and often have associated herbaria and research programmes in plant taxonomy or some other aspect of botanical science. In principle, their role is to maintain documented collections of living plants for the purposes of scientific research, conservation, display, and education, although this will depend on the resources available and the special interests pursued at each particular garden. The staff will normally include botanists as well as gardeners.
The early concern with medicinal plants changed in the 17th century to an interest in the new plant imports from explorations outside Europe as botany gradually established its independence from medicine. In the 18th century, systems of nomenclature and classification were devised by botanists working in the herbaria and universities associated with the gardens, these systems often being displayed in the gardens as educational "order beds". With the rapid expansion of European colonies around the globe in the late 18th century, botanic gardens were established in the tropics, and economic botany became a focus with the hub at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, near London.
A botanical garden is a controlled and staffed institution for the maintenance of a living collection of plants under scientific management for purposes of education and research, together with such libraries, herbaria, laboratories, and museums as are essential to its particular undertakings. Each botanical garden naturally develops its own special fields of interests depending on its personnel, location, extent, available funds, and the terms of its charter. It may include greenhouses, test grounds, an herbarium, an arboretum, and other departments. It maintains a scientific as well as a plant-growing staff, and publication is one of its major modes of expression.
The botanic garden may be an independent institution, a governmental operation, or affiliated to a college or university. If a department of an educational institution, it may be related to a teaching program. In any case, it exists for scientific ends and is not to be restricted or diverted by other demands. It is not merely a landscaped or ornamental garden, although it may be artistic, nor is it an experiment station or yet a park with labels on the plants. The essential element is the intention of the enterprise, which is the acquisition and dissemination of botanical knowledge.
A contemporary botanic garden is a strictly protected natural urban green area, where a managing organization creates landscaped gardens and holds documented collections of living plants and/or preserved plant accessions containing functional units of heredity of actual or potential value for purposes such as scientific research, education, public display, conservation, sustainable use, tourism and recreational activities, production of marketable plant-based products and services for improvement of human well-being.
Historically, botanical gardens exchanged plants through the publication of seed lists (these were called Latin: Indices Seminae in the 18th century). This was a means of transferring both plants and information between botanical gardens. This system continues today, although the possibility of genetic piracy and the transmission of invasive species has received greater attention in recent times.[10]
Near-eastern royal gardens set aside for economic use or display and containing at least some plants gained by special collecting trips or military campaigns abroad, are known from the second millennium BCE in ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Crete, Mexico and China.[19] In about 2800 BCE, the Chinese Emperor Shen Nung sent collectors to distant regions searching for plants with economic or medicinal value.[20] It has also been suggested that the Spanish colonization of Mesoamerica influenced the history of the botanical garden[17] as gardens in Tenochtitlan established by king Nezahualcoyotl,[21] also gardens in Chalco (altépetl) and elsewhere, greatly impressed the Spanish invaders, not only with their appearance, but also because the indigenous Aztecs employed many more medicinal plants than did the classical world of Europe.[22][23]
In the 17th century, botanical gardens began their contribution to a deeper scientific curiosity about plants. If a botanical garden is defined by its scientific or academic connection, then the first true botanical gardens were established with the revival of learning that occurred in the European Renaissance. These were secular gardens attached to universities and medical schools, used as resources for teaching and research. The superintendents of these gardens were often professors of botany with international reputations, a factor that probably contributed to the creation of botany as an independent discipline rather than a descriptive adjunct to medicine.[32]
With the increase in maritime trade, ever more plants were being brought back to Europe as trophies from distant lands, and these were triumphantly displayed in the private estates of the wealthy, in commercial nurseries, and in the public botanical gardens. Heated conservatories called "orangeries", such as the one at Kew, became a feature of many botanical gardens.[37] Industrial expansion in Europe and North America resulted in new building skills, so plants sensitive to cold were kept over winter in progressively elaborate and expensive heated conservatories and glasshouses.[nb 3]
At this time, British horticulturalists were importing many woody plants from Britain's colonies in North America, and the popularity of horticulture had increased enormously, encouraged by the horticultural and botanical collecting expeditions overseas fostered by the directorship of Sir William Jackson Hooker and his keen interest in economic botany.[42] At the end of the 18th century, Kew, under the directorship of Sir Joseph Banks, enjoyed a golden age of plant hunting, sending out collectors to the South African Cape, Australia, Chile, China, Ceylon, Brazil, and elsewhere,[43] and acting as "the great botanical exchange house of the British Empire".[44] From its earliest days to the present, Kew has in many ways exemplified botanic garden ideals, and is respected worldwide for the published work of its scientists, the education of horticultural students, its public programmes, and the scientific underpinning of its horticulture.[45]
There are currently about 230 tropical botanical gardens with a concentration in southern and south-eastern Asia.[49] The first botanical garden founded in the tropics was the Pamplemousses Botanical Garden in Mauritius, established in 1735 to provide food for ships using the port, but later trialling and distributing many plants of economic importance. This was followed by the West Indies (Botanic Gardens St. Vincent, 1764) and in 1786 by the Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose Botanical Garden in Calcutta, India founded during a period of prosperity when the city was a trading centre for the Dutch East India Company.[50] Other gardens were constructed in Brazil (Rio de Janeiro Botanical Garden, 1808), Sri Lanka (Botanical Garden of Peradeniya, 1821 and on a site dating back to 1371), Indonesia (Bogor Botanical Gardens, 1817 and Kebun Raya Cibodas, 1852), and Singapore (Singapore Botanical Gardens, 1822). These had a profound effect on the economy of the countries, especially in relation to the foods and medicines introduced. The importation of rubber trees to the Singapore Botanic Garden initiated the important rubber industry of the Malay Peninsula. At this time also, teak and tea were introduced to India and breadfruit, pepper and starfruit to the Caribbean.[7] 2ff7e9595c
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