ABSTRACT
Planting that is primarily structural will nonetheless endow the landscape with the detailed visual qualities of colour, texture, pattern and so on. The ‘subjective plant’, by contrast, consists of the observer’s interpretation of the objective plant. The appearance of an individual plant or a plant group can be analysed in terms of the visual properties of form, line, texture and colour. A number of plants have a distinctly flat spreading form because their stems lie on the ground rather than ascending. A large number of clump-forming perennial herbaceous plants are hummock or mounded in shape, that is they are spreading but also grow upwards, often mounding up upon themselves with their softer weak stems, or using nearby plants for support. Tussock form is effectively a smaller version of arching, and is used to refer to herbaceous plants including many grasses.
