[Laurence_Craig]

I loved reading through that plants of the year thread...it's interesting to see what other landscapers are into, personally (rather than simply hearing 'professional opinions').

This might be an artificial exercise, but I was wondering...what three herbaceous plants would you all recommend to a (hypothetical) bemused member of the general public, and why?

[agla]

Someone on one of these messageboards once used the flyfishing phrase "match the hatch". That means that you adapt to the situation. Without a situation, or criteria, best has no meaning.

The why has to be answered before the what, is what I am getting at.

[Laurence_Craig]

Oh, certainly. I've lost count of the number of times I've seen plants struggling cos the owner didn't know - or wasn't claerly told by the garden centre etc. - what conditions are needed. Impulse buying (which is very profitable for garden centres) depends upon concentrating on the visual to the exclusion of any other consideration.

That's why I say this is an artificial excercise - there are many other factors in play. It's just wondering what you all would particularly reccomend to mr or mrs general public - in terms of sensual stuff, visuals, form, etc. (Sorry, I should've made my intentions clearer).

[agla]

I mean more than cultural requirements and more than that visual sensual stuff. Lots and lots of plants are very beautiful, but context is everything. When there is no context it can be easily said that any beautiful plant would be great. Add context and the same plant would be a bad choice in the visual sense as well as a cultural sense.

I like verbena.

[GLAN]

Yeah exactly..........site conditons is a primary factor that needs to be considered first

[Laurence_Craig]

Do you not think that’s partly a matter of our ‘trained eye’, as landscapers? Given that it’s our profession, and our daily experience, to think about design matters in a specific and focussed way, aren’t we perhaps more sensitive to matters of context?

I’m sure that a significant chunk of the general public will tend to be more interested in sensual and cultural stimulation than the degree of elegance and balance in their arrangement vis a vis each other.

For example, in this country we have the “Britain in Bloom” every year, where towns get together and prettify their public places and front gardens with planting – especially bedding. The choices they make seem to be about increasing colour per se, with little apparent specificity of fit with the neighbourhood or town style, or the inter-plant juxtapositions.

What d'you both reckon?

[agla]

I'd reckon that different people value different aspects about their plants. I think that a designer should be striving to understand his client as much as the site conditions in order to consider those values specific to the client. I use the word "consider" because we are hired for our own style and taste as well as to work with our client's needs. That is part of "context" that goes past the site, cultural needs (as in cultivation - the needs of the plant- rather than ethnicity or the joy we get from them), and basic aesthetic concerns.

I also think that it is important to work for people whose values in the landscape are similar to our own rather than to try to things which we are not.

I see a lot of gardeners who cultivate fabulous plants and have no sense of composition at all. But it does not matter to them because they see the individual plants or only the small groupings of plants rather than a bigger view. Perhaps their brains are wired differently and they get a much greater joy from that then we will ever get out of looking at the broader composition. Who is to know?

This is a very diverse field with so many variables that there is never a single correct solution to anything. It always relates to what values you measure something up against. I think most people have a tendency to see their own values as the correct values and anything else as not reaching the right standard.

Having said that. I am no different in that I view things from my set of values. I just understand that not everyone has the same values. My feeling is that they are wrong, but my reasoning knows otherwise.

[Laurence_Craig]

Oh, ‘correct’ answers was never my aim in the initial question – more wishing to get a sense of what characteristics of plants you might have most recommended, from experience (personally, and out of the span of client contacts). It’s an interesting, if slightly abstract, thing to me. Particularly from the point of view that clients themselves will mostly seek out plants and planting primarily for their aesthetics (colour, form, and the like), and expect us to be able to fit those to their site (eg. through wide knowledge of plants that have the same visual type but varied environmental requirements, or compositional skill on placing things next to each other that set off well together).

In a way, we take all the procedures and considerations to operationalize their wishes as standard, and as a learned skill what we gain in a pretty technical way – knowing what people like is more a matter of listening, perhaps, and building up awareness of personal traits?

(Again, apologies if this is getting a bit abstract and esoteric!)