Pastels were out and blood reds and bruised purples - cut with acid orange and lime green - were in. Cabbages were just as likely to be tucked up against anemones as artichokes, and most plants were tightly weaving in and around others in packed tracts of foliage and flowers.
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The overriding aesthetic of last week's Flower and Garden Show was unstinting abundance. It was about plentiful planting and high-density flower arranging coupled with naturalistic textures - think rough-hewn stone or weathered timber.
While the event has attracted criticism in recent years with some complaining of a lack of experimentation and insufficient attention to the environmental, social and aesthetic roles of plants in increasingly built-up cities, the 19th show offered spectacle and substance.
Several displays addressed how we might approach the shrinking amounts of open space in our cities and most employed more plants than impermeable hard surfaces. The displays were in-your-dreams impeccable (being the result of hundreds of hours of work and sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars) but they also offered take-home ideas for the domestic gardener.
For plant selection, it was largely about the medley with little delineation among ornamentals, edibles, natives and exotics. Just as Phillip Withers had dahlias next to kale next to artichokes next to gerberas in his poppy garden (which took out the sustainability award), Mark Browning (of Cycas Landscape Design) incorporated correas and ginkgos in the garden that took out the best-in-show award. The planted-out shipping container (by the University of Melbourne and others) was topped by a meadow of Australian flowers and exotic perennials, while other designers worked with both lavender and lomandra or dianella and helleborus. Some of this was only possible because the gardens were five-day affairs and the different plant requirements (and mature forms) didn't come into play. But many combinations were expressly selected for their shared tolerance - of life on the roof of a steel container in central Melbourne, say.
Planting according to climate and place was also a key premise of those gardens containing only Australian plants - displays that came in formal and more naturalistic guises. A cleanly resolved one by the Australian Institute of Landscape Designers and Managers incorporated modular ply planters and metal cylinders filled with block plantings of seven species including Anigozanthos 'Federation Flame' and Banksia petiolaris.
In all scales of gardens orange was the stand-out spot colour of choice. The Eckersley Garden Architecture display had it in the dwarf form of Nandina domestica, a great orange-tinged expanse which was kept bushy and close to the ground and accompanied by a mass planting of lime-green agaves. Elsewhere, orange was coupled with dark purple, the foliage of heuchera and loropetalum.
Staying with the dark, death in the garden was embraced Piet Oudolf-style by Ian Barker and Bethany Williamson whose meadow-inspired display included the dried flower heads of achillea surrounded by flowering perennials and grasses and weathered machinery cast-offs.
''Weathered'' was a key look in hard landscaping elements across the show. Comfortably worn bricks and a surface emulating ageing, greening copper appeared in the harmonious garden Paul Bangay created for his first appearance at the show, while Mark Browning deployed shards of bluestone and Ros McCully stacks of rough-edged slate.
''Cocooning'' was deployed in the notes accompanying at least two displays and many of the gardens had cascading, all-enveloping elements that gave the viewer the sense of being enclosed (protected even) by plants.
But now that the show is over, the real test will be how many of us are inspired to sink our hands into the earth and actually introduce aspects of what we saw into real-life, enduring gardens.