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Visionary Landscapes: A Photographer’s Journey with Claire Takacs

When one of the world’s leading photographers of hyper-beautiful gardens decides that beauty is no longer enough, it captures your attention.

In this most recent Talk, we heard first hand from Australian photographer Claire Takacs about her epic two-year journey to explore and document 80 of the most innovative garden landscapes from around the world.

For this trip, her focus shifted to projects that dare to take on the bigger questions about sustainability, pollution, biodiversity, and urbanization, all in the face of climate change. The solutions found and realized are astounding. And in many cases, beautiful in a whole other way.

Claire collaborated with multi-talented Italian landscape architect and writer Giacomo Guzzon to create a monumental book based on these travels:– Visionary: Gardens and Landscapes for Our Future.

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Designing with Randomness: A Masterclass in Planting Design

It’s a wrap. And yes, there is a recording!

The New Perennialist Talks presents a masterclass on the far points of the leading-edge with James Hitchmough, Professor Emeritus of University of Sheffield, a genius innovator and iconoclast in modern planting design.

The 90-minute plus session on Designing with Randomness more than lives up to the masterclass title.  A gifted communicator, James rolls out a crystal clear framework for how to plan, create and manage spectacular nature-like plantings for optimal wow factor and ecological value.

Working with a combination of sowing specific seed mixes and planting, he has cultivated the ability to achieve stunning and reliable results simply not possible with one method alone.

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Trees for the Future

The best time to plant a tree will be right after you watch this talk.

Catch up on the latest thinking in tree selection for climate resilience, carbon storage, boosting biodiversity, and other essential ecosystem benefits. Not to mention for the life-giving beauty, scale and character that trees bring to our gardens and landscapes – but only if we plant the right tree in the right place.

My special guests are international tree expert Henrik Sjöman from Sweden and Arit Anderson, UK garden designer, passionate advocate for the environment and presenter on BBC Gardeners’ World. And they are here to help us think very big indeed.

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Piet Oudolf At Work: A Conversation

Right from its plain brown-wrap cover, the new book ‘Piet Oudolf At Work’ strikes a different chord in how it chooses to show and tell its story.

Oudolf has always been a visual thinker and his creative process is both far more abstract, complex and subtle than can easily be described in words. So instead of verbiage, At Work visually walks us through each phase of the design process, as the landscapes he envisions in his mind make the creative leap to colour-coded plans on paper.

This is his first book to delve into such depth, openly sharing plans from nearly 30 projects in the largest collection of his drawings ever published.

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Let’s Build Wildlife Habitat into Everyday Places Everywhere

Where others see trash in an industrial wasteland, John Little sees the raw materials to create startlingly effective ecological habitat.

For 25 years now, this English innovator has worked to recycle, reclaim and repurpose the stuff we throw away into artful ecological structures.

He takes a mix of crushed highway rubble, rusted out old cars, smashed bathroom tiles together with handfuls of wildflower seeds, and rejigs all the broken pieces to fit just about any niche in the urban jungle. Everything from green roofs and habitat walls to bus shelters and buzzy meadow landscapes.

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