Planting design

Our perceptions and relationships with plants, gardens and nature have been in flux for a long time. The productive and performative qualities of planting have been explored by many and bring about a multitude of dimensions to the way we use them. They have been illustrated in various treatises at length across time and cultures.

For kings seeking happiness, who are without pleasure gardens, youth, charm, companions, knowledge of the arts, the sound of a melodious flute, wealth — all these are useless

Manasollasa which literally means ‘the delight of the mind’ was a pre-sultanate sanskrit literary text written during the early 12th century at the court of king Someswara. It covers horticulture practices, planting design and has detailed descriptions of maintenance of plants. It is prescriptive in terms of a garden layout, layering of plants and the quality of spaces one may include for pleasure, taste, sport, recreation and contemplation. It stresses on planting design which captures seasonal qualities, blooms all year round, invites birds and butterflies and has a diverse variety to captivate a user.

Of what use will be a dish of flowers to you? A flower endures but five or six days But this flower-garden is always delightful.

Saadi Shirazi, a persian poet from the 12th century uses the garden as a metaphor for life to reflect on social and moral values through his seminal work called Gulistan. Here he explains to a friend who persuades him to pluck flowers from a garden, on how quickly they would perish while a garden would last much longer and bring delight to many.

While a lot of things have changed since Saadi’s times and our values and meanings pertaining to plants and nature have been contorted beyond acceptance, the words garden and gardener still seem beloved and invoke a very special connect.

The idea of a garden however small would perhaps be unimaginable without plants, they drape a space and complete the picture by infusing it with life.

Plants are like people, exclaimed my teacher Prof.Bhagwat, when I expressed my inability to remember their botanical names citing them as complicated. He went on to elaborate that just like people, plants have two parts to a name and come from different places with different habits and display unique mannerisms. They have likes and dislikes, friends and foes, are happy and stressed and have a purpose to fulfil before they die. Understanding them is absolutely necessary to be able to use them in design. This changed the way in which I began to read them and accept them for what they were.

Working with plants has often been perceived as an extremely immersive process whether it be tending to a field, nurture little saplings in a nursery, study forests and plant communities or toil endlessly to make a garden fruit and bloom all year. Likewise, making meticulous drawings fussing over order-chaos, colour-texture and communities-compositions is equally immersive and is largely tied back to understanding the physical context, creating sensorial stimulation and feeding various constructs of the mind.

Planting design however precise is still speculative. How much we control and steer or how far we can accommodate them is something which defines our attitudes towards design. Difficult to articulate, but one can gather that planting design as a process involves a great deal of observation, appreciation, good memory or recall and patience to achieve a perfect balance – whether an order within chaos or chaos within order.

As we borrow most of our planting design sensibilities from occurrences in nature and in nature plant compositions and their arrangement is seldom seen as incomplete, one could construe that planting is complete in itself. It probably is the most versatile tool to work with; it certainly can structure a parcel of land, create spatiality, sequence spaces, choreograph various moods, exhibit a sense of time and place and has the ability to engage our mind. There are many a garden and sites across time and space milieu which represent these attributes.

The sense of vastness, enclosure, direction, illusion, identity, elegance etc can be achieved by appropriate usage of plants. In another sense, great planting design aspires to achieve an ephemeral sense of balance.

Planting design can also be regarded as an extension of art. Prof. Shaheer notes that, “A landscape is not a painting”, where he elucidates that referring to vegetation as plant palette and landscape as a canvas can be misleading. Though the origins of landscape architecture lie in art, landscapes are not static compositions fixed in time and therefore unlike a painting a designer may not have complete control over it.

A garden is a demonstration of technical skill, brilliance and a reflection of the maker. Russel Page in ‘the education of a gardener’ (1964) reflects on the process and method which is also about calculations and lists, difficulties of construction, chance vagaries of behaviour of plants, men, soil and weather.

Planting design is not only about appearances and aesthetics, but also is about pre-emptive planning, protective measures, providing shelter , providing food, reclaiming land, repairing soils, restoring balance, re-wilding, creating habitats, capturing rains, cleaning air, buffering noise, mitigating pollution and many more.

The vocabulary is beginning to expand and while new ways of finding meanings and exploring the myriad possibilities through use of plants is gaining ground, the appreciation of plants and design that involves them shall always remain to be a unique expression of self. The genius lies in working within the parameters of ecology and environment while keeping aesthetics and dynamism alive.

Plants continue to speak to us, we only have to pause and listen.