Sowing Beauty

Zusatztext “This is a hopeful and expansive book for the gardener who can see a field as a canvas.” — Publishers Weekly “It’s impossible not to be seduced by the drama and scale of meadow and prairie planting and James Hitchmough, professor at Sheffield University in the UK, has worked on some of the most magical projects. . . . a must-read for anyone contemplating creating a similar landscape.” — Gardenista “An attractive and interesting book. . . . Sowing Beauty offers readers a hybrid of academic and popular writing related to meadow garden creation featuring plants from around the world.” — NYBG’s Plant Talk “ Sowing Beauty has all the hallmarks of a lifetime’s work; so in depth and extensive is the research, (and the photographs are especially good). . . . I would heartily recommend this book to any gardener and would expect it be on the shelf of every landscape architect.” — Gardens Illustrated “This is serious stuff for serious meadow-makers. Well done Timber Press.” — The Times “A technical guide for landscape architects and ‘ambitious home gardeners.’ Flow charts and detailed tables appear throughout, helping readers in calculating necessary seed weights and navigating irrigation questions.” — The Dirt “A mix of scientific rigour and visual extravagance. This book is a great repository of knowledge. Gratifyingly geeky, with lots of charts.” — Gardens Illustrated   Informationen zum Autor James Hitchmough is an expert in the design, ecology, and management of herbaceous vegetation. His techniques have been used to make meadows and meadow-like communities at prestigious sites worldwide. Hitchmough is head of the Department of Landscape Architecture at Sheffield University in the UK.   Klappentext Dazzling, flowering meadows—from seed. Sowing Beauty describes a revolutionary way to create beautiful, ecologically based plantings. Noted designer James Hitchmough shows how to create seed mixtures that, once sown, require only simple, low-intensity maintenance to mature into stable communities. For anyone interested in a naturalistic landscape, the techniques detailed in this groundbreaking work are the next frontier. Leseprobe Introduction This book is a little bit different from run of the mill gardening and planting design books. It’s about utilizing an understanding of how naturally occurring plant communities function ecologically, and then transferring this understanding to help design, establish, and manage visually dramatic herbaceous vegetation in gardens, urban parks, and other urban greenspaces that is long persistent, given simple low-intensity maintenance. What’s more, the book largely focuses on achieving this not through planting, but through sowing designed seed mixes. Planting is used as an embellishment but is not the main game. The information in this book is derived from more than 30 years of university research mostly at the Department of Landscape Architecture, University of Sheffield. I describe how to produce meadows in ways that provide a substantial measure of control over the outcomes—not far, in fact, from the control you get with planting. Add on 20 years of applying these techniques to practice in a large number of prestigious projects, and you sort of have this book. The vegetation discussed in this book is sometimes a facsimile of a naturally occurring plant community but generally not. More often it is an eclectic mixture of species drawn from parallel ...

Préface
Sowing Beauty is a fresh approach to creating meadow gardens from James Hitchmough, one of the world's most important and groundbreaking landscape designers. Both practical and inspirational, its combination of accessible instruction and lush photography will appeal to style-driven home gardeners and professional landscape and garden designers alike.

Auteur

James Hitchmough

Texte du rabat

Dazzling, flowering meadows—from seed.

Sowing Beauty describes a revolutionary way to create beautiful, ecologically based plantings. Noted designer James Hitchmough shows how to create seed mixtures that, once sown, require only simple, low-intensity maintenance to mature into stable communities. For anyone interested in a naturalistic landscape, the techniques detailed in this groundbreaking work are the next frontier.

Échantillon de lecture
Introduction
This book is a little bit different from run of the mill gardening and planting design books. It’s about utilizing an understanding of how naturally occurring plant communities function ecologically, and then transferring this understanding to help design, establish, and manage visually dramatic herbaceous vegetation in gardens, urban parks, and other urban greenspaces that is long persistent, given simple low-intensity maintenance. What’s more, the book largely focuses on achieving this not through planting, but through sowing designed seed mixes. Planting is used as an embellishment but is not the main game.

The information in this book is derived from more than 30 years of university research mostly at the Department of Landscape Architecture, University of Sheffield. I describe how to produce meadows in ways that provide a substantial measure of control over the outcomes—not far, in fact, from the control you get with planting. Add on 20 years of applying these techniques to practice in a large number of prestigious projects, and you sort of have this book.

The vegetation discussed in this book is sometimes a facsimile of a naturally occurring plant community but generally not. More often it is an eclectic mixture of species drawn from parallel habitats around the world, resorted to create designed cultural plant communities that flower and look dramatic for much longer than most naturally occurring plant communities. This longer flowering season benefits native animals as well as people. The vegetation is, however, always naturalistic, in that it has the visual patterns and rhythms found in semi-natural vegetation. It is also party to the same ecological processes that are inherent in semi-natural vegetation, as these processes are blind to the species present and their origins.

Prior to the development of highly intensive, fossil fuel–dependent industrial agriculture in the 20th century, flower-rich, meadow-like vegetation was much more abundant in human-settled landscapes. A visit to the low-intensity, more traditionally farmed meadow landscapes of the European Alps, or indeed almost any temperate mountain region, provides potent insight into what lowland areas once looked like and how such flowery vegetation was both aesthetically and economically important to agricultural societies. Remarkably accurate meadow depictions in medieval paintings and tapestries, such as “The Hunt of the Unicorn” (1495–1505), suggest that flower-rich meadows were highly valued for both their aesthetic and utilitarian qualities, such as the production of hay to keep livestock alive over winter.

The process of loss began in earnest in the 18th century with the use of clover to boost nitrogen in soils and the evolution of cultivation machinery that makes it much easier to plough up meadow vegetation. The invention of granular, manufactured fertilizers that make it cheap and easy to boost growth at the end of the 19th century and herbicides that allow the elimination of undesired plants in the 20th century are the final coup de grace. The subsequent elimination of flower-rich vegetation happened almost everywhere in the world, but to different degrees, depending on the affluence and ambition of the society in question. In many parts of Eastern Europe, for example, lowland flower-rich meadows are sti…