The Art of Planting Design
This month I want to talk about mass planting.
While drift planting uses flowing, organic ribbons of a single plant variety that meander through a landscape, mass planting uses large, solid blocks of plants to fill a garden space.
While both techniques group the same plant species together for high visual impact and lower maintenance, their shapes and overall aesthetic goals differ greatly.
Mass planting relies on shades of green and foliage texture rather than flowers.
The goal is to maintain structural integrity where foliage provides a stable, permanent material that allows the landscape to function as a true extension of a building year-round.
Mass planting serves as a direct extension of a building’s physical structure, utilising living plant material to replicate, elongate, and reinforce architectural forms.
By treating a single plant variety as a monolithic building block, we seamlessly transition the rigid lines of a structure into the open landscape.
Low-growing mass plantings, such as uniform groundcovers or low grasses provide a clean, uncluttered visual base that grounds a building and makes its vertical lines appear more stable and pronounced. Taller, mid-sized mass plantings function as solid partitions or living walls.
They are used to carve out distinct outdoor rooms, block unwanted views, or frame specific architectural vistas, mirroring the spatial sequencing found inside the house.
Planting a single variety in strict squares, rectangles, or long blocks can be used to echo a building’s footprint, making the landscape feel like an intentional, structural component of the overall build.
Designers will often use stepped tiers of mass plantings to taper the building’s verticality.
A tall mass of shrubs against the facade steps down to a medium-height mass, then to low groundcover mass and finally to lawn.
This creates a gradual, architectural feature that anchors the building into the terrain.
If you are interested in visiting the gardens here at Chalk House be sure to come along to the Open Garden Trail on Friday September 25 to Sunday 27.
I will be giving guided tours of Chalk House on the hour.
Hope to see you here.
Visit Clark+Granger at www.cplusg.com.au or phone 0456 111 120 to find out more.
