ABSTRACT
The designer must work with plants and observe them growing under different conditions and in different associations. It is not possible to design good planting without a sound ecological and horticultural understanding. Plants that are near the limit of their environmental tolerance will contribute little to a dynamic planting and will need frequent attention to keep them alive. Stress tolerators succeed in these conditions thanks to their ability to cope better with this stress than other plants. The primary type of disturbance experienced by urban planting is management including mowing, grazing, coppicing, thinning, burning, and cultivating. Kingsbury combines the native–exotic spectrum with the art–nature spectrum to arrive at a way of understanding the broad range of approaches currently practiced in landscape architecture and garden design. Anticipating the interactions between species is not an easy task, especially as different plants have different strategies for attaining and then maintaining their place in an ecosystem.
