So much of garden-making is in the long game. Waiting for plants to fill out and to reach their potential can take years. But for anyone with a bare patch of soil or a blank slate of a garden, it’s perfectly possible to create something not only beautiful but also low-maintenance and sometimes budget-friendly in just a few months. This is essentially the idea behind Lucy Bellamy’s new book, Brilliant & Wild: A Garden from Scratch in a Year–a simple guide for total beginners who want to achieve a wildlife friendly haven rich in color and form.
Photography by Jason Ingram, courtesy of Brilliant & Wild.
Bellamy’s book is chiefly inspired by the low-maintenance and long seasonal interest of the New Perennial Movement, whose chief proponents, including Dutch designer Piet Oudolf, create extraordinarily beautiful gardens and landscapes using naturalistic swathe or seemingly random matrices of contrasting or complementary plants.
Bellamy breaks it all down for the novice—a garden with less watering, less weeding, less work: what’s not to love? This isn’t an instant garden, exactly. Even these sorts of fast-growing perennials will fill out and multiply over time, but it’s definitely a garden of quick gratification and one that can work on almost any scale. The smallest backyard patch can be given over to a meadow of luscious perennials that will draw you outside or which you can admire from indoors.
A useful directory flags some of the best plants for this type of scheme, and to create a successful design it’s important to understand the different forms of each. Umbellifers (including the gorgeous Anthriscus ‘Ravenswing’ or the pincushion blooms of Astrantia); spikes (including colorful spears of Agastache, salvias, or Veronicastrum), or dots (the cheery bobble heads of Knautia, heleniums, or Echinops) are all listed within their groups.
For each plant, Bellamy includes a botanical profile with the best species to choose and details about how they grow, where they look best in the garden, and what other plants will make good companions.
By being very selective, Bellamy gives us a range of plants that will work with all the others in various combinations. With simple sketches, she shows us how to make the scheme work using groups, repetition, or simple matrix designs.
After you’ve cut it all back in late winter, you can make way for a succession of spring bulbs that will bring a joyous array of color to the garden before the perennials really get going in late spring.
- The 10 Books Every Gardener Should Read
- Alexa’s Library: 9 Favorite Classic Garden Books
- And browse our Required Reading archives for more of our 2018 book reviews, including The Less Is More Garden and Designing with Palms.