Planning and Planting: The Human Touch
While I wait for Mother Nature’s next cruelty to gardens, I am busy planning new plantings. They vary with gardens’ categories: new ones, small ones, big ones in need of revitalisation and big ones that are gloriously empty and need planting throughout. Planning of plantings can be micro or macro. It can be obsessive, down to the last mini-primrose, or relaxed, about which plants in a big batch will eventually go where. It is fascinating to see which type of planner new garden owners begin by being and which they become with experience.
The Role of Technology in Planning
I leave myself latitude when a plant plan has to become planting in reality, but it is a latitude framed by a broader plan of what I need where. Should the planting plan simply be done digitally, especially with use of AI? In my case, no, because I am not digitally deft and at this time of year, I am screen-shocked after coping with online tax returns, compiled with VAT systems whose add-ins do not function and whose compatible hubs to HM Revenue & Customs then fail on New Year’s Eve.
Digital vs. Human Planning
In your case, perhaps the answer is yes. I am discussing planting plans, not garden planning without plants. Digital software and systems, much like spades, can be useful tools, but their existence has not made the human skill of planning planting redundant.
Vegetable Beds vs. Flower Beds
Vegetable beds are simpler, being restricted planting areas: they are better served by tech. The contents of flower beds are more complex, often less formal. Use of search engines or apps such as iscapeit.com throws up lists of flowering plants of this or that height, color or season, but those lists exist anyway in catalogues and books. Targeted questions put to AI resources (aigardenplanner.com is one) also help planners to find plants with graded colors and heights, but they do not come up with brilliant personal choices: tall thalictrums as tallboys down the middle of a border’s length or flopping specimens of Aster frikartii Mönch at intervals along a border’s front line. Their anomalous heights are hard for tech sources to interweave.
The Importance of Serendipity
Digital programmes can space each plant if asked and produce a plan that is printable to scale on graph paper. Digitally savvy beginners may start by finding this plan reassuring: surely it is better, a breakthrough from the “bad” old days and a bypass round its footling with sketches and inked-in blobs? So far, I disagree. The printouts are not in principle different to the hand-drawn planting plans devised by the doyenne of garden planting, Miss Jekyll, about 125 years ago. She drew plants interlocked in drifts, not circular clumps, and sometimes she micromanaged. She also specified precise numbers of plants of each variety. Her plans were ignored after her death, but not because technology made them superfluous. Many of them were left to moulder in a shed in Somerset. They were acquired from uncaring Britain and taken to the US.
Conclusion
Tech tools and digital resources depersonalise the process. Does use of them eliminate serendipity, the happy hitting on a random choice that then works out very well? I think it pushes it back a stage. Serendipity can come in earlier if we hit on novel searches to put to AI. Surely the programming will improve but I wait to see if a hort-bot of the future can come up with a plan in, say, the style of Sissinghurst garden and its founder, Vita Sackville-West. It will flounder because some of Sissinghurst’s most famous plantings were the work of her successors for the National Trust, especially Graham Thomas and the brilliant duo whom she left in charge, Pamela Schwerdt and Sibylle Kreutzberger. Hort-bot would have to delve into the online records of Sackville-West’s gardening columns, 12 years or so of them, in search of authentic evidence of her style.
FAQs
Q: What are the benefits of planning a garden?
A: Planning a garden can help you create a beautiful and functional outdoor space that meets your needs and improves your quality of life.
Q: Can I use digital tools to plan my garden?
A: Yes, there are many digital tools and apps available that can help you plan your garden, including garden design software and apps that allow you to create a virtual garden plan.
Q: What are some key considerations when planning a garden?
A: Some key considerations when planning a garden include the climate and soil type, the amount of sunlight and shade, and the types of plants you want to grow.
Q: Can I use a hort-bot to plan my garden?
A: While hort-bots are not yet available, they may be developed in the future. However, even with advanced technology, a human touch is still necessary to create a unique and beautiful garden design.
