Now, in October, with the perennial beds turning brown and gold, the grasses lit from behind by the low sun and the coneflower seedheads standing black above it all, a good garden looks as if it had simply happened by itself. It didn't, and none of these pictures came about by chance.
Gardening, at heart, is a way of heightening nature. We take what nature offers, pick and choose, put it in order, plant it more densely and turn up the volume. We intervene in a place and in a space. Above all, though, and this gets talked about far too rarely, we intervene in time.
It starts with choosing the plants. What should flower in April, what in August, and what is going to carry the garden through the winter? Then comes the arrangement: which plants sit next to each other, how the layers work, what takes over when something else fades. Planting is nowhere near the end of it, either. We steer growth. A well-timed cut in early summer holds back flowering, so a perennial blooms later and stays shorter and sturdier. We cut back to get a second flush, or leave things standing on purpose so the seedheads can form. In the end we are deciding when a picture should appear and how long it gets to last.
The natural in a garden is not the absence of design. It is design at its highest.
— Folko Kullmann
It is a creative process, and a fascinating one, with practically no limits to creativity or personal taste. A strictly formal Baroque garden is as much garden art as a cottage-garden bed, and a border in pastels counts just as much as a Japanese moss garden. Everyone is free to make their garden the way they want it.
What strikes me again and again, though, is how a garden that looks naturalistic, one that fits its site and moves with it, strikes almost everyone as especially beautiful. That includes people who don't otherwise care much for gardens. I see it every time in places like the Oudolf garden on the Vitra Campus: people stop, sit down and look, and plenty of them are not gardeners at all.
Yet a garden like that is no less made than a Baroque parterre, and probably more so. It takes a huge amount of knowledge, experience and careful management for something to look that effortless. Making a garden look natural is an art form of its own.
So why do we respond to it? My guess is that it goes back to very old, very basic feelings about beauty, and to a bond with nature that sits deep in us however urban our lives have become. The biologist Edward O. Wilson had a word for it, biophilia: an innate leaning towards living things. You don't have to sign up to every theory built on that to feel there's something in it. What looks natural seems right to us, and what seems right, we find beautiful.
A naturalistic garden plays to exactly that feeling. Its plants grow in communities, the way we know them from meadows, woodland edges and steppe, with repetition and rhythm, dense patches and glimpses through. You also watch time pass in it, from the first shoots through flowering and seedheads to dying back. Because it celebrates the turning year instead of hiding it, it feels familiar.
Two books on our list are about exactly this, and we are reprinting both of them. They should be back from around the beginning of December, in good time for Christmas. The first takes us to Bruton in Somerset, to Hauser & Wirth and the large perennial field Piet Oudolf designed there, the Oudolf Field. I was there myself this summer and had a long talk with the head gardener.
Its author, Rory Dusoir, is a Kew-trained gardener who followed the garden through a whole year with the photographer Jason Ingram. The book describes in close detail how the garden is put together, area by area: the block plantings and matrix plantings, the plant lists and the design principles Piet Oudolf works by. It also follows the garden through the seasons and shows what the gardeners do to keep it looking the way it does.
It's very nearly a blueprint. Hardly anyone has that much ground, of course, but if you'd like to try the look at home, scaled down to a single border or a front garden, you'll find what you need here. Which plants does Piet put together, what works with what, and how does he start on a design in the first place?
The second book is about something quite different: the floristry of Rachel Siegfried. Floristry is its own art, its own way of handling plants from the garden, and it owes nothing to the rules of horticulture, to planting for the site or to Right Plant, Right Place. For the short time something sits in a vase or a bowl, you can put together whatever you like. A shade perennial next to a steppe plant? In a vase, no problem at all.
Still, the garden's rules creep back in. Take your models from nature, use what the season happens to be offering and combine that, and you'll make the loveliest arrangements, with branches that tell you the time of year and perennials, grasses and climbers to give them movement. They have little in common with the loud, brightly coloured bunches most of us know.
What sets Rachel's book apart is that she grows every plant in it herself. She runs Green & Gorgeous, a cut-flower farm in Oxfordshire, teaches courses there, and started out as an estate gardener in the Cotswolds. Over the years she has trialled a great many species and varieties, and the book is her pick of 128 proven perennials and woody plants. Any garden can grow them, they come back year after year, and they give insects and birds somewhere to live along the way. She shows how to combine them so they look natural and have a beauty all their own, and the nice thing is that you can grow every one of them yourself.
At first glance the two books have little to do with each other. Different authors, different subjects: one of the most important planting designers of our time and his great perennial field on one side, a bunch of flowers on the kitchen table on the other. They fit together surprisingly well, though. Both show that what moves us most is design that works with nature and takes the place, the season and the plant itself seriously.
Gardening remains an intervention. Perhaps it's the loveliest one we know, though: one that, in the end, looks as if it had never happened.
This essay first appeared in German on plantvs.de in October 2026.
