Last week I was invited to give a talk on trends in horticulture. Which styles are “trending” and which are passé?
Time was, the assignment would have been a no-brainer. A few of you may remember, for instance, when perennial borders came back into vogue.
Creating a pleasing show of flower color took experience and skill. There were rules to help a novice avoid disaster, such as don’t plant just one of any plant but in groups of three or more. There were tricks to be played by contrasting foliage color and texture to knit together different floral hues and ease the transition from one blooming period to the next and to get the garden through the August doldrums, when almost nothing is at its peak, before late bloomers took charge.
Cool colors like blue and gray were often clustered at one end of the border and hot colors (red, yellow, orange) at the other end.
We all learned how to read a color wheel, and assumed that it was flower color only that the colors on the wheel represented.
Borders were “edged” in tidy low plants like lady’s mantle, with taller plants standing behind them much as people are arranged by height in family photographs, with a clipped hedge or stone wall as the backdrop.
Perennial borders are still the hallmark of many of England’s most famous formal gardens, but they are no longer a must-have. In fact, if I had to describe what’s trending today, it’s “anything goes,” as long as it obeys not the rules of Martha Stewart but the laws of Mother Nature.
I used to write for a magazine called Garden Design. I thought of it as horticultural haute couture, the gardening equivalent of Vogue. Others called it garden porn.
Every issue had its cover girl, a single specimen, usually in bloom but not always, photographed against a solid background. A simple narcissus was as glamorous as Angelina Jolie.
Sometimes the plant was chosen to represent what was “cutting edge.” When the tropical look came on like gangbusters in the 1980s, elephant ears graced the cover.
Then came ornamental grasses. Garden Design sent gardeners running to buy a feather reed grass as amazing as the one on the cover.
As always there were rules to follow: These fancy new grasses were best planted en masse, so they moved in drifts in a summer breeze, perhaps alongside batches of native plants — coneflower, rudbeckia, blazing star.
Then came the cultivars — “improved” varieties of politically correct plants. The Garden Design cover featured a coneflower that looked like bee balm crossed with a sunflower.
Foliage replaced fIowers as the main attraction in the fanciest gardens. Shade gardens had their day in the sun. I wrote a humorous piece for Fine Gardening asking the question: How many variations on the theme of coral bells could there be? I’d lost count. And what did the very first coral bell look like anyway? Could anyone remember? Did anyone even grow it anymore?
One of Garden Design’s most striking cover girls was a cactus. It almost made you flinch when you picked up the magazine. Those were some sharp spines on that thing. Xeriscaping had just been invented to give homeowners in arid climates a way to garden that didn’t require sacrificing the kids’ college education in order to foot the water bill.
As the 21st century loomed, all these trends began to coalesce. People began to see gardening as a way of reclaiming the earth from industrialization. Caring for a garden became an end in itself. A learning process and a healing process at the same time. Gardens were planted everywhere — in front yards and boulevards, in city parks and freeway medians — as demonstration sites for a massive rescue mission.
Gardening is almost by definition a “local” endeavor. National gardening media have always struggled with regional climate differences. What works in Arizona won’t work in Maine. The internet dealt magazines like Garden Design the final blow.
Anyone can start a blog. Now topics trickle up instead of down. In today’s garden, instead of trend watchers informing the gardening public what’s up, information flows broadly, around the globe and across the fence by ordinary gardeners sharing their stories and the stories themselves creating the trends.
The big story or trend, if you will, is nature. A garden isn’t like a closet, a repository of styles collected over the decades that add up to a mish-mash, but an ever-evolving, living thing. That plants can’t be treated like other disposable, mass-produced products, but must live in balanced ecosystems to thrive, gripped the imaginations of gardeners everywhere and of all ages.
Gardening has always defied labels and rules. It is practiced by all sorts of us for all sorts of immediate reasons — we like to cook, or we like fragrance or beauty or both, or all three. Plants feed our souls and our bodies. They feed our minds. Their presence in our lives challenges us to solve problems. The events this week in Houston are yet another reminder of what those problems are.
It is the responsibility of gardeners not only to learn and grow but to teach. Encourage others to take up the trowel. Dig a hole, examine the earth. Get to know its creatures and how they live and what they do for all living creatures.
It’s about balance. The tipping point is upon us.
