Nature knows best

Carol Klein explains how to choose plants for specific growing conditions, based on what has naturally adapted to thrive there

- Carol Klein

A year ago, together with a band of like-minded helpers, we built a great big show garden at the RHS Hampton Court Palace Garden Festival. Perhaps 'built' is the wrong verb, 'plant' is what we did. The garden was all about the plants. It was meant to illustrate the ethos of choosing plants that are going to thrive in the situation you have.

Gardens are not the same as nature, but studying nature, learning lessons from what grows where and in what conditions, illuminates the way forward for us gardeners. To that end, the garden was divided into different areas, each one a reference to a specific habitat that would inform plant choices in a garden situation.

In real life the chances of having six different habitat types in one garden are pretty remote, but this was a show garden and an opportunity to present six different sets of conditions that visitors could identify with.

The difference between nature and gardening is cultivation. If we impose our will on our plot regardless of the growing conditions, we're unlikely to have a happy garden. Evolution has decreed what will thrive where. Over millions of years, plants and their environments have developed side by side, and plants have found ways of coping so they can successfully reproduce and keep their line going. That is the primary purpose of all forms of life to continue to exist.

To this end, plants have developed myriad means of adapting to and moving with their environment. Just look at the prickles of a rose - ideal for deterring hungry herbivores and simultaneously affording 'crampons' to assist in climbing towards the sun. Or consider the tough glaucous leaves of a sea kale, their texture and undulations coping with sea spray and sun, while the long tap root thrusts down among the shingle, both to help the plant hang on in times of storm and tempest and to draw up nutrients and fresh water from the depths below.