Workshop: Sustainable and Resilient Succession Planting
This new workshop is designed as an opportunity to enhance your plant knowledge and to grow your confidence to successfully plan and maintain the succession of your planting within your garden. Succession planting in garden design is about planning the layout to ensure a continuous display of plants in bloom or something of interest. It involves carefully selecting and positioning plant varieties that will flower or showcase distinctive features at different times.
This session will give you an insight into the techniques in how you can create a dynamic display that changes with the seasons by integrating plants with varying flowering periods, foliage textures, and colours.
This workshop will be theoretical (classroom based) to learn about succession planting principles, practical (garden walk) to evaluate plants and sample plant combination in the garden and discussion based as an opportunity to view and discuss scenarios and to answer individual questions. This session will feature visual samples (photos) from the tutor’s garden projects showcasing expert succession planting for open discussion and question and answer opportunities.
This is a session we recommend to all with some gardening experience that would like to take the next step into creating a successful all year around every season display in their own or a communal garden. There will be a small practical exercise of creating a successional planting plan from a choice of plants to apply what has been discussed, to experiment with individual ideas and to take back as an inspiration for your own garden.
The aim of the course is for students to leave with an understanding on how to extend the season of interest in a garden for visual appeal but also for creating wider biodiversity and for the benefit of wildlife.
Together we will cover:
Planning and evaluating
Seasonal Interest
Layered Planting
Long-term Vision
Biodiversity & Wildlife
We will share our tips on how to create and maintain a successional, biodiverse, and resilient garden with minimal use of resources to achieve maximum output for wildlife, wellbeing and enjoyment by welcoming life and colour into your space, through a design and installation that works for you.
Join us for this journey into the fundamentals of sustainable and resilient succession planting. We also encourage plenty of questions, and welcome discussion in shaping the session.
Please bring along photos of the planting in your garden for the discussion session.
Please note this workshop refers to ornamental succession planting in a garden not the succession planting of vegetable gardening which is used to ensure a constant supply of fresh produce.
Meet Michael
Michael is a Senior Gardener at Great Dixter, and an experienced outdoorsman and primitive skills practitioner. He has lectured on subjects of Rewilding, Habitat restoration as well as Foraging, and teaches in Wales, Scotland, Norway and Southern UK. Michael is involved in several biodiversity projects including the restoration of wildflower meadows within several communities around East Sussex, UK.
Price: £85