Book Excerpt: Planting in a Post-Wild World

"Tomorrow's designed landscape will be many things--more plant driven, site responsive, and interrelated--but one thing it will not be is stylistically the same as its predecessors. It is perhaps easy to assume that plantings layered with a diverse mix of species would be necessarily naturalistic in style. In many cases, this is true. But gardens of any style can benefit from applying natural principles. Whether the planting is formal or informal, classical or modern, highly stylized or naturalistic does not matter. What matters is that plants are allowed to interact with other plants and respond to a site. This is the essence of resilient planting."
--Thomas Rainer and Claudia West (2015), p. 243