Information about the book
Introduction
Over the years I have worked in the far reaches of Australia, designing and creating gardens for compact inner-city courtyards through to sprawling rural estates. Each project throws up fresh challenges, requiring a careful balance of proportion and scale within the confines of the landscape available. But by far the most important decision of the whole process is choosing which plants to use and where.
For example, I love to plant pleached hedges of ornamental pear (Pyrus) or linden (Tilia), but neither of these will work in Brisbane. And I've always been fond of formal clipped English box (Buxus sempervirens), but it would be absurd to incorporate it into a tropical garden.
So how do I select the right plants for my designs?
When I first visit a site for a new garden, I always check what grows well in the local botanical gardens, and I can often be found peering into neighbours' gardens to examine their plants, especially those that are doing well. It also pays to take note of the vagaries of the climate at your particular site. Sometimes a plant might do well in a neighbour's garden but wither and die in your own because of a particular microclimate that occurs in that position. The specific climatic conditions that you experience at your place, combined with how much water is available, are the two most important factors when deciding what to plant.
Once I have observed the climate and microclimates of a site, that's when I start to draw on my list of reliable favourite plants which I have compiled over the years and which is contained within the covers of this book. There have been countless additions as I've discovered new plants that love Australian conditions, and I've also taken many plants off the list that just can't cope with our extremes of temperature. All the plants included here have been used successfully in gardens I have designed throughout the country
This is a very personal collection of favourite plants. It is not meant to be an exhaustive plant reference guide – there are plenty of those. Rather, it is a sort of catalogue of suggested plants for those who like my gardens and would like to create something special in their own plot.
I have to acknowledge that the plants I most enjoy working with are those that enjoy cold to warm temperate conditions – plants that do well in the south of the continent and north up to Sydney and rural New South Wales. I adore all the wonderful perennials and bulbs that require a cold winter and no humidity in the summer, and for this reason you'll find more plants in this book that fit these criteria than ones which thrive under tropical or subtropical conditions. Apologies to my friends up north, but I hope you will find enough here to inspire you.
My ultimate goal is to create gardens that stand the test of time, eliminating the need to replant every 10 to 15 years. As with the architecture of the house, the garden should remain. This is how I would like to see my gardens, remaining in harmony with the buildings, mellowing with time and maturing into a place of timeless elegance.
Of course gardens do evolve with time and one part of this process is that the minor plants change; this may be due to increased shade as trees mature or simply because you want to experiment with other plants or colours.
Do not be afraid to pull out plants that are not doing well. A garden is not a hospital for sick plants. The garden should give you the joy of seeing a thriving green space, where nature meets you at home. If a plant is not working in the space it's been given, relocate it or discard it altogether.
This book is very much a companion to my previous title, Paul Bangay's Garden Design Handbook, in which I touched only lightly on plant selection. While the design book takes you through the methodology I use in creating my garden spaces, this book gets down to the nitty-gritty of why we garden in the first place – the plants! My hope is that this collection of my very favourite plants, gloriously photographed by the wonderful Simon Griffiths, gives you plenty of inspiration to experiment with plants in your own garden.
