Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic While I wait for Mother Nature’s next cruelty to gardens, I am busy planning new plantings. They vary with gardens’ categories: new ones, small ones, big ones in need of revitalisation and big ones that are gloriously empty and need planting throughout. Planning of plantings can be micro or macro. It can be obsessive, down to the last mini-primrose, or relaxed, about which plants in a big batch will eventually go where. It is fascinating to see which type of planner new garden owners begin by being and which they become with experience.I leave myself latitude when a plant plan has to become planting in reality, but it is a latitude framed by a broader plan of what I need where. Should the planting plan simply be done digitally, especially with use of AI? In my case no, because I am not digitally deft and at this time of year I am screen-shocked after coping with online tax returns, compiled with VAT systems whose add-ins do not function and whose compatible hubs to HM Revenue & Customs then fail on New Year’s Eve. In your case, perhaps the answer is yes. I am discussing planting plans, not garden planning without plants. Digital software and systems, much like spades, can be useful tools, but their existence has not made the human skill of planning planting redundant. Vegetable beds are simpler, being restricted planting areas: they are better served by tech. The contents of flower beds are more complex, often less formal. Use of search engines or apps such as iscapeit.com throws up lists of flowering plants of this or that height, colour or season, but those lists exist anyway in catalogues and books. Targeted questions put to AI resources (aigardenplanner.com is one) also help planners to find plants with graded colours and heights, but they do not come up with brilliant personal choices: tall thalictrums as tallboys down the middle of a border’s length or flopping specimens of Aster frikartii Mönch at intervals along a border’s front line. Their anomalous heights are hard for tech sources to interweave.Digital programmes can space each plant if asked and produce a plan that is printable to scale on graph paper. Digitally savvy beginners may start by finding this plan reassuring: surely it is better, a breakthrough from the “bad” old days and a bypass round its footling with sketches and inked-in blobs? So far, I disagree.The printouts are not in principle different to the hand-drawn planting plans devised by the doyenne of garden planting, Miss Jekyll, about 125 years ago. She drew plants interlocked in drifts, not circular clumps, and sometimes she micromanaged. She also specified precise numbers of plants of each variety. Her plans were ignored after her death, but not because technology made them superfluous. Many of them were left to moulder in a shed in Somerset. They were acquired from uncaring Britain and taken to the US.Tech tools and digital resources depersonalise the process. Does use of them eliminate serendipity, the happy hitting on a random choice that then works out very well? I think it pushes it back a stage. Serendipity can come in earlier if we hit on novel searches to put to AI. Surely the programming will improve but I wait to see if a hort-bot of the future can come up with a plan in, say, the style of Sissinghurst garden and its founder, Vita Sackville-West. It will flounder because some of Sissinghurst’s most famous plantings were the work of her successors for the National Trust, especially Graham Thomas and the brilliant duo whom she left in charge, Pamela Schwerdt and Sibylle Kreutzberger. Hort-bot would have to delve into the online records of Sackville-West’s gardening columns, 12 years or so of them, in search of authentic evidence of her style.A fearful prospect looms: could hort-bot or even ChatGPT come up with a planting plan in the style of Robin Lane Fox, based on an even bigger database, my weekly FT columns, 55 years in all this month? However, writings change over time, even those of a gardener as great as Sackville-West. Would a cull of them, ignoring dates, produce a genuine plan that the author would endorse?Between the planning and the practical result, hazards beset digitally derived planting plans in the real world. A veneration can crumble when bits fail in reality, frosted, slugged or dried out after hitting the ground.Problems of space compound problems of time: to which type of garden is the planting plan being applied? Trying to enhance an existing plan by digital sources is difficult: if you overprescribe the shape and assets of existing plants, do you limit the range of what might otherwise look excellent as their new companions?In a big blank garden, a different placing of one or two plants usually occurs to their planter on site on the day. Over-prescription in advance kills spontaneity. A new wave of technology may try to factor it in, but I consider it antithetical to technological systems’ working.I wait to see if a hort-bot of the future can come up with a plan in, say, the style of Sissinghurst gardenSo here are a few hard-won, pre-digital principles for each type of garden to be planted. Be aware of the height and width of shrubs or trees before you choose and place them. We all plant too closely, a mistake that our growing impatience is intensifying. You may think you will be moving house before this mistake becomes serious, but it is a bad mistake nonetheless.In small enclosed gardens, heights and spans can often be contained, to a degree that digital sources find hard to factor in. Pruning, beyond the recommendations of books and lists, will allow some giants to be included. In enclosed spaces, one or two extra tall features can work well and add a jungly look. For that, choose upright plants that are not too leafy. In bigger gardens this pruning and extra heightening look wrong. In them, space out the shrubs to suit their mature dimensions and fill the spaces between them with temporary, quick-growing cover. Varieties of low-growing buddleja or ceanothus are excellent, as are bushes of pink-white mallow, or lavatera, that can go between them.In small gardens remember that maturing wall shrubs dry out the soil beneath, and around their spreading roots. Most of the clematis family are ideal alternatives as they like to emerge from other plants, so long as their roots are regularly watered and fed. If you want to block out your neighbours with a line of trained trees, remember that their roots will also block out planting beneath them as they age.One of my inspirations in the garden has been Helen Dillon, famous for the sublime garden she devised in Dublin in her active lifetime. I first heard her when she was interviewed in 1993 on primetime Irish TV. She was asked what she thought of garden plans. “Bugger plans”, she retorted, not because her garden had no clear ground plan, but because its plantings evolved as a process, one suggesting another to her ever-vigilant eye. AI and digital resources would not have achieved it: I suspect they never will. Find out about our latest stories first — follow @ft_houseandhome on Instagram
