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This on New Wave Planting, is just in from the New York Times, about the trendiness of letting gardens decompose beautifully.

Plant photos: the greens,
oranges and reds of cornus are beautiful in the winter, but I’ve
learned the hard way that they should not be planted in a place where
you are looking into the sun when you view them, or you never notice
their color.  I love the mundane tones but fireworks shape of
dill left out in the snow.

I had no idea I was so fashionable. I’ve always believed gardens, which party hard three-quarters of the year, should be given a chance to sleep it off. In some cases, plants should be allowed to just declare they’ve had it. They’ve done their job.

I don’t chop them down or cut them back. I spend the winter admiring them.

There is a second great advantage to this approach, which is that it gives us garden dreaming time. Instead of cutting back dead grasses I spent a couple hours last week at Schilliger Garden Centre in Gland, my personal favourite place for reflecting on what the coming year’s garden will look like.

It’s too early to worry about the weather. It’s the rare time when I
can go in there and spend what I planned, rather than twice as much. I
am not a disciplined plant shopper.

I wander around the store, nearly
alone, and contemplate new gloves, new clogs, packets of things I’ve
never tried and others I must remember to buy again.

For once I am not distracted by the store’s magnificent displays of
flowers because there are almost none, although I do have to look at
what’s there.

Everything looks so neatly squared in garden shops this time of
year, which I find helps the dreaming process. Geometry instead of
lushness is the order of the day, giving a new perspective, starting
the creative process all over again.

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