Design For Maintenance 2

Thursday 17 September 2014 Ashford International Hotel, Ashford, Kent

Noel Kingsbury is a plant designer, writer, researcher and consultant. Best known for promoting what is broadly called an ecological or naturalistic approach to planting design, he has written 20 books on various aspects of plants and gardens, three of them in collaboration with Dutch designer and plantsman Piet Oudolf.

Noel will be taking the ‘rabbit’s eye-view’ when he speaks in September at Palmstead’s Soft Landscape Workshop on long term plant performance.

Q. You have been invited to speak at Palmstead’s ‘Design For Maintenance 2’ workshop this September, what will you be speaking about?

I will be encouraging designers and landscape architects at the workshop to get down on their hands and knees and see what’s happening at ground level, to learn the key indicators behind long term performance plants - ‘the rabbit’s eye-view’ if you like. If you haven’t had much tactile contact with plants it’s a key issue to get to grips with.

Long term performance is such a key issue for anyone in the profession utilising planting design. Landscape architects are often criticised for rolling out ‘green cement’, but as an industry we haven’t been good at looking at the idea of ‘long-term’. Unlike construction materials, plant materials can’t be tested in labs for longevity and there is a shocking lack of long term performance knowledge in the industry as a whole.

Q. How can we look for long performing plants?

We can use various methods of assessment including surveying experienced gardeners, looking at perennials and implementing a strategy for looking at shrubby too.

I am particularly interested in promoting perennials in public spaces - building on the work of Professor James Hitchmough and Dr Nigel Dunnett at Sheffield and the work of Dutch garden designer Piet Oudolf, and also in looking at how we can use plant technology and science to inform people in the design profession.

Q. What plants do we typically use as an industry that don’t perform well for long periods?

Some of the plants we use frequently as an industry in planting schemes have a limited lifespan such as Echinacea purpurea - it’s a popular plant but it’s not a predictable performer in our UK climate and has a shortish lifespan. There is a whole suite of plants that are considered perennial but which I’d argue aren’t perennial - a fair number of which are used in the industry.

Q. Why are these choices being made?

The perennial popularity is driven by the retail sector, so when designers want to design long term they’re up against it.

Q. What impact does the use of poor performing plants have on the maintenance costs of a design?

It’s crucial - if you have plants that live a long time, this reduces long term costs - there’s no need to replace the plants for a start. I would particularly like to encourage greater awareness of the longer term life cycle of a plant and how this can be used in terms of reducing maintenance costs.

Q. What can we do to help provide a planting scheme with predictable maintenance costings?

Using species that have some ability to physically spread and cover ground are useful, but also high density planting may have longer term savings, and also looking at some of the new techniques developed in the States and Germany - using plant mixtures, meshing plants together that provide good ground coverage, which are also both bio-diverse and visually rich.

Q. What do you think of Palmstead’s proposed Directory Tool Kit which will include a reference section to help designers cost the maintenance of a design?

No one in the industry in the UK has yet been systematic about costings - so the reference and directory tool kit is an interesting idea. If Palmstead manage to draw up a list of gardens around the country that are good examples the directory itself could help designers and clients to work out the man hours behind their schemes and designs. I know of a German garden with thirty different habitats which has a detailed log which can tell you how many man hours it takes per square metre per year - to have access to something like that would be very helpful to us as an industry.

Noel Kingsbury is best known for promoting what is broadly called an ecological or naturalistic approach to planting design. Noel has written 20 books on various aspects of plants and gardens, three of them in collaboration with Dutch designer and plantsman Piet Oudolf. Over the years he has written for Gardens Illustrated, The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, The Garden, Hortus, The New York Times and many other publications.

Noel has been actively involved in the promotion of quality public planting for many years, having worked as a design consultant on several projects with Bristol City Council, as well as on private gardens. He is a consultant in the field of garden maintenance and development, roof greening and other aspects of ‘green architecture’ including collaborations with artists working in the public sphere.

Noel’s articles on “Long Term Plant Performance” in the Garden Design Journal are available at www.palmstead.co.uk/downloads.