When it comes to gardening, site resilience is the key to ensuring that your plants thrive in any condition. Using a diversity of species is the first step in designing a successful garden.
Read MoreCREATING A GARDEN WITH SITE RESILIENCE
Native plants
SHADE GARDENING
Choosing the right plants for shade gardens — just look at the complexity of plants on the forest floor next time you take a hike.
Read MoreWHAT IS A SPRING EPHEMERAL?
Garden designers orchestrate flower bloom interest throughout all the seasons. Spring ephemerals fill an early void in the spring landscape design in the garden.
Read MoreSURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST IN THE GARDEN
“The greatest service which can be rendered to any country is to add a useful plant to its culture.” –Thomas Jefferson
The Darwinian approach of Natural Selection asserts that species adapt to various environments. Selection is the process by which the organisms that are best adapted to their environment tend to be the ones that survive to reproduce and pass on their genes to the next generation, hence the term ‘survival of the fittest.’ The environment is the ‘genetic sculptor’ which can, over time, change the characteristics of the organisms within a population.
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NATIVE PLANTS
Roberto Burle Marx (1909-1994) one of the seminal figures in 20th century landscape design, was the child of a Brazilian mother (Burle) and a German-Jewish father (Marx). His mother fostered his passion for gardening and his father in design. His father had immigrated to Brazil around the turn of the century. Born in Sao Paolo, at the age of 19, (1928) Roberto moved to Berlin to study art while engrossing himself in the massive cultural revival of the Weimar Republic. (Burle-Marx left after a couple of years as the political climate had quickly changed, most obvious of which was the building anti-semitism). However, It was while studying painting in Germany during the Weimar Republic, as he would later tell it, that Burle Marx realized that the vegetation Brazilians then dismissed as "scrub and brush," preferring imported pine trees and gladioli for their gardens, was truly extraordinary. Visiting the Botanical Garden in Berlin, he was startled to find many Brazilian plants in the collection and quickly came to see the untapped artistic potential in their varied shapes, sizes and hues.
The irony here is that these native Brazilian plants were not as prized in Burle-Marx’s homeland of Brazil as they were in Germany. Yet the twist is that they were soon to disappear from the Botanical Gardens because at around this time the Nazi party was developing it’s “Blood + Soil” ideology. “Blut und Boden” ideology insisted on the close relationship between nature and the German people and with it, preached the crucial role of landscape in forming and preserving national culture. This included the banishment of all non-native plants and trees from the Fatherland (Germany).
Reich Minister of Food + Agriculture Richard Darre,
one of the leading proponents of "Blood + Soil."
Tried and convicted at the Nuremburg trials, he died of alcoholism.
