When Teresa Woodard contacted the makers of the 20 gardens she hoped to include in the book she was conceiving, getting across what she had in mind took a little explaining. Just what was this maximalist gardening style she wanted to write about, they asked — and how exactly did they fit in?
“None of them defined themselves as maximalists,” Ms. Woodard recalled — well, maybe one did. The person behind a 700-square-foot brick patio in San Francisco that was home to 300 potted plants, the smallest garden of all, knew the label fit him.
But to her eye the other 19, too, whether suburban lots or grand, multiacre estates, were likewise established masters of maximalism. Borrowing from other design realms, she saw the genre as a “crossover trend” in horticulture, she said.
“I noticed maximalism was making a comeback in fashion and interior design,” she added. “That got me thinking, what would it look like to fully celebrate the lush, abundant, and wildly personal beauty of maximalism in the garden?”
And there was another hook, she said: Many gardeners are embracing abundance “not just for beauty, but for a purpose — to attract birds, reduce their carbon footprint, and create habitats for endangered species. They prove more is truly more, especially when it comes to plants for our environment.”
As different as her wish-list gardens were, each was “packed with personality and joy,” and anything but minimalist, she said. The core trait of every one — whether embodied in a color scheme, a collection of particular plants, or some other theme reflecting a fascination of the person behind it — was dialed up, way up. To the max.
And yet even at such high volume there is no apparent noise, no chaos in the pages of “Garden to the Max: Joyful, Visionary, Maximalist Design,” which Ms. Woodard created with the photographer Bob Stefko. She attributes that to the thoughtful editing and showcasing each gardener exerts on the elements of their living compositions — to what she calls out as acts of curation, a word she uses more than once.
She points to curation as the defining factor between just a whole lot of plants, and a composition that works, “allowing the spaces to feel unified and intentional,” she said.
The Color Green
In the tradition of maximalist interior designers who make lavish use of paint, wallpaper and textiles, the extra-confident application of color is one obvious unifier. More, when employed strategically, is never too much.
Two exceptional gardens Ms. Woodard chose with strong color stories were not colorful in a flowery way at all, but brought to life in vivid shades of green.
Dale Sievert has been collecting moss since 2006, and a diversity of species play different roles in his 5,000-square-foot Japanese garden with a katsura tree (Cercidiphyllum japonicum) as its centerpiece. Mr. Sievert, a retired economics professor in Waukesha, Wis., uses moss not just for carpeting stretches of ground, often mounding the soil up first for an undulating effect, but he also caps trees stumps and covers boulders with it. (Hint: He uses silicone caulk as a temporary glue until the moss takes hold itself.)
What really drives his moss-as-garden-signature point home: how he artfully adorns the landscape with more than 100 troughs and bowls filled with it, many of them holding miniature mossy mounds.
Shade-loving foliage perennials such as hostas, ferns and mayapple (Podophyllum peltatum) play roles in the greening, too. But moss is the velvety star, a delicate-looking, soft-against-hard foil to Mr. Sievert’s generous use of stone, including more than 11,000 fieldstones employed to edge paths and line water features.
Developing a Distinctive Geometry
The green-on-green world that is the garden of Silas Mountsier and Graeme Hardie in Nutley, N.J., is of an entirely different scale. It was imagined as a setting for displaying Mr. Mountsier’s collection of large sculptures around the grounds of the 1890s Colonial-style house, itself painted green, that was his childhood home.
Decades ago, the couple enlisted the Seattle-based garden designer Richard Hartlage to help. To make the sculpture collection at home and respect the stature of some of the property’s large trees, Mr. Hartlage knew that small and fussy would not work. He specified plantings with their own substantial, insistent presence, ones that could provide correspondingly strong statements and form the elements of the garden’s own distinctive geometry.
Examples: 18 European hornbeams (Carpinus betulus) are meticulously shorn into rectangular shapes, many more than 14 feet tall and sculptural in their own right. A circular lawn area adjacent to a group of them is flanked by two 160-foot crescent-shaped mounds, each alive with thousands of plants of Japanese forest grass (Hakonechloa macra).
When Flower Pots Really Add Up
Even if there is no room for botanical expression on such a scale, most every garden has containers. But are they simply placed here and there and everywhere, or instead staged for maximum impact?
Various landscapes in the book, including Mr. Sievert’s moss garden and that San Francisco patio at the apartment of Clarke de Mornay, capitalize on pots’ potential power.
Mr. de Mornay, a horticulturist at Flora Grubb Gardens nursery, has assembled a diverse plant collection and as distinctive a range of containers to showcase them in. He put several large potted palms to work to create a kind of canopy for bromeliads and orchids that appreciate relief from the sun, which the cacti and succulents arranged in the patio’s more open areas relish.
His garden may all be staged on level hardscape, but the sense of terrain Mr. de Mornay has conjured with 300 tightly packed vessels seems anything but flat, thanks to their varied heights, and clever positioning.
“The way he has some staggered at different heights kind of creates a stadium-like look,” said Ms. Woodard, who also noted details like a collection of tiny pots raised on a table for closer inspection, and others hanging on a wall.
Jared and Liz Hughes are in the nursery business, too, operators of Groovy Plants Ranch in Marengo, Ohio. Some of the cactus and succulent oddities that are among their many plant passions found their way home with the couple, and were assigned an unexpected task. They serve as edging.
Between ample, wildly colorful flower beds occupying what might otherwise be their front lawn, 140 terra cotta pots of unusual plants are lined up two and three deep along both sides of a stone walkway leading to the plant-packed porch. The resounding message: Plants welcome here.
Going Heavy on Texture
Paging through the book, a reader cannot help but ask: Is there some element in my garden that if dialed up would make an outsize difference in the composition’s overall impact?
Texture is another possibility to play with, and at 5,160 feet in Fort Collins, Colo., the horticulturist Lauren Springer went for “epic texture,” said Ms. Woodard, while respecting the reality of her garden’s xeric conditions, extreme temperatures and the ecological and visual contexts.
For parts of her five-acre site, she took inspiration from the area’s native shortgrass prairie, massing fine-textured natives such as buffalo grass (Bouteloua dactyloides) accented with strappy yucca and other tough subjects.
In Arlington, Ind., surrounded by a landscape dominated by corn and soy fields, Irvin Etienne decided his garden needn’t blend in at all. Mr. Etienne, curator of herbaceous plants and seasonal garden design at Newfields, the Indianapolis art museum, leaned heavily into big leaves and strong color choices to create his own tropical world.
He includes generous doses of bronze and burgundy foliage, from bold tropicals like cannas and red Abyssinian banana (Ensete ventricosum Maurelii), to hardy, finer-textured Black Lace elderberry (Sambucus nigra) and purple smoke bush (Cotinus coggygria). Choice gold-foliage selections of such plants as sumac (Rhus) or pokeweed (Phytolacca americana Sunny Side Up) make for sharp contrasts.
The borders are massive, and there are even a couple of pink flamingo statues among the towering plants. Count Mr. Etienne among the proponents of the more-is-more school of horticulture.
“I could get away with less, but I like more,” he told Ms. Woodard, invoking the voice of a personal hero of his, the maximalist Dolly Parton.
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