A landscape designer’s guide to structural planting in winter
There is a particular kind of plant that earns its place not through seasonal performance but through permanence. And there is a particular kind of nursery that understands this. Last month I took a client out to Exotic Nurseries in Dural, NSW, where mature, well-grown specimens sit side by side. For a client who has struggled to visualise scale on paper, standing next to a two-metre Xanthorrhoea or a cluster of silver torch cactus changes everything.
August is the right time to think about structural planting. The garden is stripped back, the bones are visible and the low winter light does something remarkable, catching the underside of a grass tree’s foliage, illuminating the white spines of a cactus column, throwing the blue-grey fans of a Nolina into sharp relief.
