A MONSTROUS ANTHEM

The garden designer’s relationship to shrubs is moderately troubled. In the 1980s, the New Perennial movement rejected the rigid ubiquity of sculpted shrubs (typical of the early 20th-century British garden) in favor of prairie-style meadow plantings of matrix-based stands of grasses and perennials. The authors of Shrouded in Light: Naturalistic Planting Inspired by Wild Shrublands, gardener Kevin Philip Williams and ecologist and horticultural researcher Michael Guidi, make a persuasive case for returning the shrub to the field of contemporary planting design to inspire a more ecologically responsible, botanically respectful, and conceptually “new wild” garden. Resilient across habitats, shrubs thrive in the hottest and harshest places on the most remote parts of the globe, and closer to home, in sites of human–nature interface—what Gilles Clément calls “third landscapes” in his Manifesto…