For landscape architects and garden designers alike, there is a contemporary approach to planting design that seeks to mimic or at least draw inspiration from the dynamics and make-up of natural plant communities.

Mount Usher gardens, Co. Wicklow planted to William Robinson's naturalistic style

Wildflower meadow - pic taken at a friend's house in Wicklow

There are a plethora of approaches from the monastic purists who will only use native plants to soft liberalists who will allow exotics but arranged in a “natural” manner: a complete breakdown of natural and ecologically inspired planting styles is given by Noel Kingsbury in Hitchmough and Dunnett’s  “The Dynamic Landscape“(2004).

My route in to landscape architecture was in many ways the “wrong-way-round”: I graduated as a geographer and then became a conservation ecologist dedicating a year of my life to habitat creation with the British Trust for Conservation Volunteers and only later on rekindled a childhood interest in landscape and garden design.

In many ways, I have now come full circle, as I am now keen to infuse my landscape and garden designs with as much of an ecological thrust as my clients will allow.

Originally posted in the THE LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT’S JOURNAL BY TIM AUSTEN