Naturalistic planting

She won Olympic acclaim, and gold at Chelsea, with her naturalistic planting. Now Sarah Price explains how to achieve the effect at home.

Serene, green and calming, Tom Stuart-Smith’s restful woodland planting was much admired at this year’s Chelsea Flower Show. We dissect the planting plan so you can get the look, too.

Lottie Delamain considers the characteristic of Dutch plantsman Piet Oudolf's famous style of naturalistic planting, and advises on how to get the look at home

It’s about setting aside our desire for control to instead work in partnership with nature. This is essentially the guiding principle behind the naturalistic garden, a plant-driven approach to landscape design that has been around in one form or another since Englishman William Robinson first published his first edition of The Wild Garden in 1870.

This garden’s matrix-style planting is composed of more than 40 genera organized by their functional role. Find plant IDs here.

Suffolk garden design of beautiful naturalistic perennial planting, limestone gravel pathways and clay pavers, multi-stem birch trees, crab apple trees, wildflower meadow and minimalist front garden of calamagrostis karl forester with beech cylinders