The Best Native Shrubs for Year-Round Interest and Seasonal Color
Native shrubs offer some of the most reliable, low maintenance, and ecologically beneficial options ...
By Thomas Rainer and Claudia West
Rating: 🌳🌳🌳🌳🌳/5 Trees
Genres: Non-Fiction, Garden Design, Horticulture
If you’re looking for landscape design inspiration and guidance that goes beyond the stereotypical look of suburban gardens, this is the book for you.
Rainer and West approach garden design with the belief that humans have an innate emotional connection to natural and wild spaces. While these wild spaces may be in sharp decline across the globe, the authors acknowledge this loss and use it as a starting point for their design principles.
The purpose of this book is to serve as “a guide for designing resilient” and “stylized versions of naturally occurring plant communities” (20), allowing us to maintain our emotional connection with nature within urban and suburban settings.
Rainer and West provide tools that gardeners and designers need to select plants for their site, layer those plants, and create compelling compositions. Perhaps the most intriguing part of this guide is the description of the four natural archetypes that should be emulated in garden design. They recommend that the design process begin with an assessment of the site to determine which archetype it most closely aligns with: grassland, woodland/shrubland, forest, or edge.
Each archetype is broken down, and its primary elements are explained in a way that even beginner gardeners can understand. The authors clarify the composition and ecological benefits of each archetype, helping readers visualize how to translate natural systems into stylized landscapes.
Rainer and West show designers and gardeners how they can mimic these archetypes while still maintaining the neat—and sometimes even heavily stylized—look of traditional gardens.
Keep in mind that when recommending plants for these designs, the authors allow for the limited use of exotic plants. These can play a role in designed plant communities—though don’t worry, they strongly discourage the use of invasive species.
When it comes to native species, Rainer and West emphasize that because native plants are “naturally adapted to their specific sites,” they “can and perhaps should be the starting point for developing high-quality designed communities. In many ways, starting with a native plant community as a reference point can simplify the design process” (41).
This book moves beyond the well-worn maxim of “right plant, right place” and takes a more holistic approach to garden design—one that looks at the relationships between plants and place, plants and people, and plants and each other.
We highly recommend this book for its accessible and unique approach to garden design. It gives both professional designers and at-home gardeners the tools to bring natural plant communities into urban and suburban environments.
