Landscape designer and author Page Dickey writes about using “see-through” plants to add height, texture, and airiness to her gardens. Pictured is the author’s garden with one of her see-through plants, a red valerian (Centranthus ruber).

“It’s going to take a few more years to tweak this small front garden to my liking. My notes are full of directions to move this and plant that. And perhaps it will never knock anybody’s socks off. But it gives us pleasure. …”

— Page Dickey, “Uprooted: A Gardener Reflects on Beginning Again,” 2020

“Uprooted” reminds me of Beth Chatto’s “Woodland Garden” (2005) that I wrote about in February because both books focus on garden design and selecting the right plantings for the growing conditions available at specific sites. However, Chatto renovated a neglected farm in Essex, UK, basically starting from scratch with her landscape designs, whereas Dickey inherited gardens at her new (to her) home in Connecticut that had been professionally designed by someone else before she bought the property.

I’ve been in both situations, and I’ve learned that each has its advantages and disadvantages.

Starting a garden from scratch is exhilarating and overwhelming, and expensive — so many ideas, so many plant choices, so much money! I have been working on a woodland garden that will eventually cover about an acre of land, and while it’s exciting to choose plants and decide how they will be arranged beneath the canopy of trees, it’s time-consuming and labor-intensive to do the work ourselves.

I recently spent $300 on plants for a 100-square-foot section of the garden, so it’s clear that I will need to reproduce plants from cuttings and seeds or go broke. I’ll also need to learn patience as the new plantings take their sweet time to fill in.

On the other hand, when we moved to Medford in 2009, we inherited a professionally designed garden in the backyard with a dry creek bed and a variety of understory trees. That could have been exhilarating if I had been content to leave it alone and simply enjoy my new surroundings. But I am a gardener, and I’m not good at leaving gardens alone. I feel compelled to fiddle here, tinker there and meddle everywhere else.

These days, my expertly designed backyard is a hodgepodge of plantings that reflect the professional landscaper’s vision of two decades ago and all that fiddling, tinkering and meddling from me.

I’ve been pleased to read in “Uprooted” that Dickey likes to tinker with her inherited garden, too, and I’ve noticed that she’s particularly partial to adding in tall herbaceous perennials that sway in the breeze. Many of these plants are what Dickey calls “see-through” plants, those “you can have in the front of a bed or mid-border because the delicacy of [their] tall stems and bobbing flowers only enhances more robust flowers around them.”

One of the see-through plants she mentions is Sanguisorba canadensis, of the burnet family, a North American native with attractive scalloped leaves and off-white catkin-like blooms that arch 4-5 feet over the foliage on wiry stems. I’ve grown salad burnet (S. minor) in my vegetable beds, so I was interested to learn there are several ornamental Sanguisorba species that produce white, pink or burgundy flowers from summer to fall.

Like the ornamental Sanguisorba species, many see-through plants grow from low-growing basal rosettes from which emerge long, pendant stems that bear the flowers. For years, I’ve grown the graceful Gaura lindheimeri ‘Whirling Butterflies,’ with pinkish-white flowers on dark stems. I love the airy texture of this drought-tolerant perennial and the fact that it attracts bumblebees and butterflies.

Other types of see-through plants have tall, erect stems or scapes. Some examples are the tall daylily species Hemerocallis altissima ‘Autumn Minoret’, Astilbe x arendsii ‘Chocolate Shogun’ and ‘Bridal Veil’,’ Verbena bonariensis and giant meadow rue (Thalictrum rochebrunianum). Some bunchgrasses are also see-through plants, such as blue oat grass (Helictotrichon sempervirens) and hair grass (Deschampsia cespitosa).

Dickey is an acclaimed garden designer, so I smiled when she admitted she might have gotten a bit carried away with her garden tweaks. “I have abandoned, at least for now, the attribute I know is most visually satisfying in a garden — simplicity,” she writes. Dickey’s plan for creating more coherence in her hodgepodge garden? Adding more plants, of course!

I mentioned above that I’ll need to propagate many of the plantings for my woodland garden to save costs, and fortunately, I’ll have a chance to brush up on those skills at a couple of upcoming classes offered by the OSU Extension Center.

On Nov. 1, Jared Grzybowski, owner of Goodwin Creek Gardens in Williams, will discuss “Plant Propagation from Cuttings, Divisions and Seeds” from 6-8 p.m. via Zoom and at the Southern Oregon Research and Extension Center, 569 Hanley Road in Central Point. “Propagating Native Plants from Seeds” will be led by native plant expert Suzie Savoie of Siskiyou Ecological Services and Klamath-Siskiyou Native Seeds. This class takes place via Zoom only from 6-8 p.m. Nov. 8.

The cost of each class is $15, which supports the OSU Land Steward program. For more information or to register, visit https://beav.es/UcY or call SOREC at 541-776-7371.