Think Broadway, jazz hands and Arnie Schwarzenegger.
Then there are purse-pets, cougars, jocks and Joe-straight; deprive anything of the detail that makes it random, niche, and it becomes a type. (Surprise!)
The barely functioning stereotype is a spectre of the planting-design world, and more generally of the landscape design world, as much as the stereotype is present in any other human sphere. Until we have a degree of familiarity with our subject that allows it to generate its own permutations without our censorship it remains reduced, substituted by a fictitious cardboard cut-out body-double with a drawstring voice recording that quips punchlines in a tinny voice (like Talking Malibu Stacy).
To arrive at the shores of observer acceptability for its own unique qualities (without triggering the innate human alarm that identifies strangeness as strangers) a thing, person, plant, must do two contradictory things: 1. Must be known enough to register as ‘known’ (in Monopoly-speak: Pass GO), and 2. Must be able to separate from the projective substitute that comes with that initial knowing (Get out of jail free). In this way ‘being known better’, known enough to be allowed to separate from the card-board stand-in that ascribes to you your qualities (quite probably a succinct group, those of an abbreviation), really equates to being known less, but having been given the hall pass to be less known, less predictable, less reliable even (because being reliable when you’re a stereotype means confining your actions and traits to a small set of predictable, idealised behaviors).
So back to our lead-in topic: When plants are constrained to the lives of stereotypes it can’t go well. The result is tired, tired repetitions of repetitions of…, each not actually responding to site, but each probably fluking some basic aspects of site and flunking others, and, the result is the attitude that certain plants that can’t ‘go with’ other plants, or within certain planting design styles, regardless of an actual assessment of their aesthetics and site-capability. After all blue and green shall never be seen, and don’t get me STARTED on pink and orange.
As an Australian designer, it is most interesting to see some of the planting design of overseas exponents of the craft. I saw some examples of American work recently in which Australian natives were integrated in an unexpected planting context to great effect. It occurs to me that natives here are possibly more subject to the detriments of typecasting than exotics.
I’m not really including the international style of ecological planting commenced in response to the outstanding work of people like plantsman Piet Oudolf, and James Hitchmough, but those in this instance using an expressionist style of planting design, using a mixed structural planting palette to express their design goals. In these cases there is attention to the plants’ capacity for the site, but apart from that the gates are comparatively open to all-comers and it elucidates some unexpected liaisons.
It’s interesting, because one sees some surprising breaches of planting-design stereotype, not everywhere, but sometimes, and it reminds me personally to keep my cardboard cut-outs out of the design studio, out of peoples’ gardens.