EBOOK
About
James Hitchmough is well-regarded in the design world for his exuberant, colorful, and flower-filled meadows. His signature style can be seen in prominent places like London's Olympic Park and the Botanic Garden at the University of Oxford. Using a distinct technique of sowing meadows from seed, he creates plant communities that mimic the dramatic beauty of natural meadows and offer a succession of blooms over many months, a technique that can be adapted to work in both large-scale public gardens and smaller residential gardens. Sowing Beauty shows you how to recreate Hitchmough's masterful, romantic style. You'll learn how to design and sow seed mixes that include a range of plants, both native and exotic, and how to maintain the sown spaces over time. Color photographs show not only the gorgeous finished gardens, but also all the steps along the way. Sowing Beauty is a fresh approach to creating meadow gardens from James Hitchmough, one of the world's most important and groundbreaking landscape designers. Both practical and inspirational, its combination of accessible instruction and lush photography will appeal to style-driven home gardeners and professional landscape and garden designers alike.
James Hitchmough is an expert in the design, ecology, and management of herbaceous vegetation. His techniques have been used to make meadows and meadow, like communities at prestigious sites worldwide. Hitchmough is head of the Department of Landscape Architecture at Sheffield University in the UK.
Introduction
This book is a little bit different from run of the mill gardening and planting design books. It's about utilizing an understanding of how naturally occurring plant communities’ function ecologically, and then transferring this understanding to help design, establish, and manage visually dramatic herbaceous vegetation in gardens, urban parks, and other urban greenspaces that is long persistent, given simple low-intensity maintenance. What's more, the book largely focuses on achieving this not through planting, but through sowing designed seed mixes. Planting is used as an embellishment but is not the main game.
The information in this book is derived from more than 30 years of university research, mostly at the Department of Landscape Architecture, University of Sheffield. I describe how to produce meadows in ways that provide a substantial measure of control over the outcomes, not far, in fact, from the control you get with planting. Add on 20 years of applying these techniques to practice in a large number of prestigious projects, and you sort of have this book.
The vegetation discussed in this book is sometimes a facsimile of a naturally occurring plant community but generally not. More often it is an eclectic mixture of species drawn from parallel habitats around the world, resorted to create designed cultural plant communities that flower and look dramatic for much longer than most naturally occurring plant communities. This longer flowering season benefits native animals as well as people. The vegetation is, however, always naturalistic, in that it has the visual patterns and rhythms found in semi-natural vegetation. It is also party to the same ecological processes that are inherent in semi-natural vegetation, as these processes are blind to the species present and their origins.
James Hitchmough is an expert in the design, ecology, and management of herbaceous vegetation. His techniques have been used to make meadows and meadow, like communities at prestigious sites worldwide. Hitchmough is head of the Department of Landscape Architecture at Sheffield University in the UK.
Introduction
This book is a little bit different from run of the mill gardening and planting design books. It's about utilizing an understanding of how naturally occurring plant communities’ function ecologically, and then transferring this understanding to help design, establish, and manage visually dramatic herbaceous vegetation in gardens, urban parks, and other urban greenspaces that is long persistent, given simple low-intensity maintenance. What's more, the book largely focuses on achieving this not through planting, but through sowing designed seed mixes. Planting is used as an embellishment but is not the main game.
The information in this book is derived from more than 30 years of university research, mostly at the Department of Landscape Architecture, University of Sheffield. I describe how to produce meadows in ways that provide a substantial measure of control over the outcomes, not far, in fact, from the control you get with planting. Add on 20 years of applying these techniques to practice in a large number of prestigious projects, and you sort of have this book.
The vegetation discussed in this book is sometimes a facsimile of a naturally occurring plant community but generally not. More often it is an eclectic mixture of species drawn from parallel habitats around the world, resorted to create designed cultural plant communities that flower and look dramatic for much longer than most naturally occurring plant communities. This longer flowering season benefits native animals as well as people. The vegetation is, however, always naturalistic, in that it has the visual patterns and rhythms found in semi-natural vegetation. It is also party to the same ecological processes that are inherent in semi-natural vegetation, as these processes are blind to the species present and their origins.