serendipity

Serendipity: the faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries by accident.
Oxford American Dictionary of Current English

Designing plant combinations is largely knowledge: of growth requirements, local performance, climatic characteristics of the original plants or ancestry, color theory, knowledge of the subtleties of each plant variety and experience. There is also a significant portion of serendipity. Designers are well aware of this, keeping an eye out for serendipitous events, even setting up situations for serendipity to occur. In one of my studio classes, my instructor advised me to stop using the computer to design. She suggested that I return to the old method and use trace paper, pencils and pens, and freely sketch designs to take advantage of accidental occurences. I did. What resulted was a more expressive, exuberant expression of my idea.

Similarly, this is the difference between designing a garden (i.e. planting schemes) on paper, and designing on site. There is certainly value in designing on paper. There is just a time when it is just as pleasurable to just mess around in the garden. When that change occurs is a matter of personal preference, and project. In a professional project, there's less "messing around", and what I'm talking about is primarily one's own garden. It's one of the things that makes me say that to design well, you have to have a garden.

In your own garden, there is much more room for error. As with any design process, you find out many things that don't work in order to discover the things that do work. In the private garden, there is the freedom to move things around at will. There is the freedom to experiment, to do things without thought, and then deal with unsatisfactory events at will.

Of course there is another difference between the private garden and the professional design (among many): the plants in a personal garden may be plants that would never be used in a public scheme. The plants may be too fragile, too ephemeral, require too much care or maintenance, borderline in hardiness. But that shouldn't stop someone from taking advantage of the learning.

When Will went to Amsterdam in the fall several years ago, he brought back a few sacks of tulip bulbs for me. Intending them to be planted in my Blue Garden, he bought tulips that were said to be blue (that's like saying a rose is "blue"), and some that were said to be white. I allowed him to plant them ad-lib in the garden. When they appeared the following spring, the "white" tulips were a creamy yellow, and the "blue" tulips were a vibrant red-purple. They also didn't bloom at the same time, the yellow appearing first, then fading just as the purple tulips began to show color. The serendipity was that the color of the purple tulips exactly matched several things in my garden: the redbud flowers that bloomed at exactly the same time, and the red-purple of the Santa Rita Opuntia, which still had its winter color. Although they didn't match the blues in the garden, nor did they conform to my idea of the garden, the effect was not entirely unpleasant.




Last fall, I planted grape hyacinths (see previous post). In my haste I planted them wherever I found a space. To my surprise this spring, the grape hyacinths bloomed at the same time as the Veronica tauricula, in complementary shades of blue. This is particularly fortuitous considering the brief bloom season of each, in particular the veronica, whose display lasts less than two weeks. The grape hyacinths may last a bit longer, certainly longer than many spring bulbs.

I don't know if these combinations will ever be used in another garden other than my own. The veronica in particular is not a plant that I would consider for public planting. But you can bet that I'll keep my eye out for what is blooming around town to discover other serendipitous ideas.