Plants in Design

I have taught introductory plants classes to landscape architecture students for ten years and have always struggled to find a good textbook. Many of us in temperate zones probably learned about plants using Michael Dirr’s Manual of Woody Landscape Plants (2009), the “Horticulture Bible.” Originally published in 1975 and now in its sixth edition, it remains an invaluable resource for the ardent plantsperson, but it is perhaps overly exhaustive for most students and professionals. Recently I have been using The Tree Book (2019), by Dirr and Keith S. Warren. It is heavily illustrated and benefits from an introductory chapter on plant production and selection specific to professionals, but it tends to focus on specific cultivars more than necessary for an introductory text. Neither the Manual nor the Tree Book includes much discussion of design.

Plants in Design: A Guide to Designing with Southern Landscape Plants (UGA Press, 2021) by Brad E. Davis and David Nichols, might just be the text I’m looking for. The obvious predecessor to this book is Identification, Selection, and Use of Southern Plants (2010), by Neil G. Odenwald and James R. Turner, which for decades has been the standard text used in the lower South. Odenwald and Turner were long-time professors at Louisiana State University, where both Davis and Nichols studied; therefore, Plants in Design could be viewed as the authors’ reimagining of their pedagogical roots.

The two books are similarly laid out as an encyclopedia of landscape plants, with each entry limited to a single page and with supplementary discussion on planting design. Plants in Design benefits from a much more regular and coherent organization of information compared to the often-chaotic numbered listings in Southern Plants, and it includes photographs, whereas the latter only has line drawings. Plants in Design is also much more comprehensive, including more plants than are included in the latter text. Despite going through four editions and three revisions since its initial publication, Southern Plants is decidedly out of date and contains many errors. It is time for a replacement.

Plants in Design includes five introductory chapters and 17 chapters on “Species Accounts.” The introductory chapters are especially useful for students and rarely found in other plant encyclopedias. Although not as exhaustive as other planting design books, it provides a useful guide to understanding plants for their design features and is sufficiently comprehensive for the level of planting design taught at most institutions. The “Species Accounts” catalog sections are organized by habit (large trees, medium evergreen shrubs, etc.) and include sections on often-ignored categories such as turfgrass, interior plants, and invasive exotics. Each section opens with a one-to-two-page narrative introduction focused on design considerations and is accompanied by a helpful table of characteristics for all plants included in the section. Individual plant entries are limited to one page with a brief introductory paragraph, regular subsections of detailed information, and illustrations containing two-to-seven (typically four) images. The legibility of the book’s abundant tables and illustrative graphics is great.

Plants in Design is a textbook with the quality and feel of a richly illustrated portfolio. The book is well designed, with thicker pages and obvious attention to typography and white space. That is part of its problem. While the content balances applicability for both public and professional audiences, it feels more like a “coffee table” book. Southern Plants was great for its compact portability in the field (while somehow maintaining sturdy pages) and its utilitarian aesthetic, where adding hand-written notes felt natural. Plants in Design is a big book, and adding notes feels like defacement. It needn’t be this way. While the book is richly illustrated, the authors could have been more judicious with their choices of images; in many cases, there are duplicate images that appear similar without giving more information about the species. Take, for instance, the two bottom images of the red maple, the repeated images of the pignut hickory fall foliage, or the two habit shots of Reeves spiraea, to name a few. The one-inch end margin on each page also feels unnecessary.

Other criticisms are few. The authors could have included a bit more information on each plant, and references to seminal publications on individual species would have been nice. Dirr does this sporadically in the Manual, but consistent reference information for each species would be useful to an academic audience. The six pages of references included at the end seem inadequate for an encyclopedic academic text, although I don’t doubt the accuracy of the information. Overall, Plants in Design is a thorough, well-written, and welcome addition to our bookshelves; it will be useful in the classroom and for professional practice throughout the southeastern United States.