Jac Semmler is a plant practitioner and director of Super Bloom plant practice, bringing dynamic living beauty and diversity to places and spaces through planting design, high-skill horticulture, plant advocacy and plant x art projects, with a mission of ‘plants for the people’ in a changing climate.
An internationally recognised horticulturist, creative and innovator in dry summer planting design, Jac is the author of Super Bloom: A field guide to flowers for every gardener and The Super Bloom Handbook, published internationally.
We recently had a moment with Jac to discuss her philosophical approach to gardening and what lessons she has learned along the way, ahead of her much-anticipated book launch of her new title, Flower Power.
Your work with seasonal flowers feels deeply attuned to place — how does the Australian climate shape the way you design and write about gardens?
The Australian climate is well-known for its extremes, and I find it to have a great beauty and resonance. There is a quality to Australian light through the day and the seasons. The luminosity of plant adaptations of our southern continent and those that are climate compatible, which can reflect and capture light.
The xeric qualities, the succulent and the seasonal responsiveness that plants can have with a sudden influx of rain, the survivability of extreme dry and fire. Their adaptive and temporal qualities are a constant reminder that gardens and plantings are ever-changing entities, dynamic through time. Responsive and at times ephemeral. This has greatly shaped how we embrace plantings through time and the experiential qualities we want the communities of plants to emit.
When planning a garden or floral arrangement, do you begin with structure, colour, scent, or emotion — and how does that first decision guide the final outcome?
First and foremost, it’s the emotion, what experience and feeling do I first want to cultivate – be it within the intimacy of our personal secluded home gardens or for the public realm. I do think it is a feeling, sometimes intangible, and then a pragmatism of plant performance and associations within a community of planting.
Colour, structure, scent all forms the constellation that wraps around the ultimate experiential aim. Plants in their wonder and diversity are so incredibly nuanced that one element need not be exclusionary of others. Gardens and plants are experienced by the body and it is the emotion and overall experience that guides the design as it layers.
Sustainability is becoming central to contemporary floristry. How do you approach soil health, seed selection, and seasonality in your practice?
It is both important and pragmatic to work with natural practitioners for plantings in gardens and landscapes. Choosing resilient beauties that are compatible with the changing climate is first and foremost. Working within the seasons is intrinsic to how planting can naturally establish in our variable seasons. Working with the seasons and planting Autumn to Winter gives the plants a natural advantage for summer extremities. In public plantings, we often work with the current status of soils, considering performance for what is rather than supplementing and modifying to desire.
What lessons has tending a cutting garden taught you about patience, failure, and timing — and how have those lessons influenced your creative philosophy?
Gardening and planting are always joyful in that design is only a starting point. Cutting gardens and the lifecycles you see unfurl with the seasons have instilled within me that planting and work in the plant world is a process and a practice rather than a result or endpoint. To collaborate, be strategic and adaptive with nature, to cultivate dreams in earnest and hope for the seasons to come – all these invaluable lessons that gardens instil in our lives.
For aspiring gardeners wanting to grow more expressive, abundant floral spaces, what foundational principles do you believe matter most?
Go forth with a brave heart. The practice and doing of gardening builds an intuitive bodily intelligence that evolves with time, so get going and learn through doing. In our busy modern lives, it is the incremental tests and trials in our gardens that can teach us the most and build upon over time.
Mass. More flowers is indeed merrier. There is such a simple distilled luxury to a generous garden so learn and practice simple skills to expand plants and plantings for mass. Sowing seeds can be approached with plug trays with numerous cells rather than a few punnets. Consider numbers of plants as 7, 9 and 11 + not 1 or 3 as space allows.
Be playful and learn from what you take pleasure in and flourish in your garden. There really is no such thing as a black thumb.
Discover Jac’s new book, Flower Power, at all good bookstores.
Photos by Sarah Pannell @sarahpannell.
