THE WELL-DRESSED GARDEN by Marty Ross

LIVING ARCHITECTURE IN THE GARDEN

Garden designers look for plants with striking presence to give their landscapes great substance, style and polish. Large plants come first to mind as architectural specimens, but it is important to take a wide range of sizes and shapes into consideration.

"You have to use color, form and texture and create a dialogue with the architecture of a site," says Brian Kissinger, owner of Thomas and Todd in Paradise Valley, Ariz.

Kissinger loves to work with magnificently sculptural palm trees and the chiseled shapes of agaves in his desert gardens, playing their forms and colors against the clean lines of modern regional architecture.

Good design isn't plant-specific, and in any climate, the most successful designs will juxtapose bold architectural plants and less assertive selections, says Kissinger, who previously lived and worked in Kansas City, Mo. There he often planted blue Atlas cedars, yews and river birches and sketched scrollwork parterres in liriope.

Liz Innvar, a garden designer who works with clients in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, uses traditional plants with panache. She likes classic landscape plants with striking forms, she says, "and I like the idea of contrasting architectural plants with something softer. The key is to find a balance."

Boxwood is one of her favorites. She frequently uses it as a building block for her designs. Like Kissinger, she likes to put the strong shapes of boxwoods together with plants with looser habits, adding a bit of color with perennial flowers.

"I like to play with formal and informal shapes and the wonderful contrasts you can create with it," she says.

Innvar teaches garden-design classes at the New York Botanical Garden, usually in the winter, when her clients' gardens are resting. She has an experienced gardener's appreciation of perennial plants and the impact they can have in a garden design. She likes to place plants with small leaves next to large-leaf specimens with strong shapes -- a gaura, for example, with its dancing white or pink flowers, by a bold, big-leafed acanthus.

It's often the foliage, not the flowers, that make the biggest impression in a perennial garden, Innvar says.

"I love Rodgersia for the texture of its leaf," she says. "I love the way light plays along the surface, and I use it in all kinds of different situations."

Architectural plants can be a focal point or a destination, just like a pergola or an arbor would be, or they can be attention-grabbing accents. When they're planted thoughtfully they cast arresting shadows that change through the seasons. They can take their places gracefully in a mixed border or stand out starkly against the surrounding scenery.

In Kansas City, Kissinger's garden was a dense woodland full of surprises tucked under the canopy of huge old oaks. In Arizona, he lives with towering date palms. The effect is not dissimilar, he says.

"Your eye can't help but move from one palm to the other, and, just like the oak trees, they lift you up, and they have a canopy that caps it off -- so it's still an intimate experience, even though the trees are huge," he says.

Through her design classes, Innvar has learned that gardeners need practice working with scale, and that people who love plants struggle to limit their selections and make disciplined choices.

Clustering several identical plants together helps new gardeners overcome the tendency to line everything up, she says, and limiting your choices will bring the garden into focus. Too many different plants lead to what she calls "dot-and-dash landscaping."

"Make up a plant list and figure out the scale of each clump, then be careful not to have all the clumps be exactly the same," Innvar says. Let a cluster of architectural plants, like Inula helenium, which has leaves up to 2 feet long and flowers that stand 4 to 6 feet tall, strike a bold stance in the landscape. But then balance it with a larger grouping of something softer, like nepeta (catmint).

For inspiration, both Innvar and Kissinger say they study nature and natural plant groupings. The best designs, Kissinger says, "look like somebody did it, somebody with a good eye -- and that's nature."

SIDEBAR

Garden designers use plants with striking, almost architectural forms to define the spaces and establish the character of a garden. Here are some ideas from Brian Kissinger, owner of Thomas and Todd (www.thomasandtodd.com) in Paradise Valley, Ariz., and Liz Innvar (www.lizinnvar.com), who designs gardens in the New York area.