I love lots of natural-style plantings that I’ve seen, but I also appreciate a sensitive use of geometry. Click here to see a planting of fifteen Pachypodium geayi (Madagascar palms) that I ran across rummaging through the plant files at the davesgarden site. Wouldn’t this be an awesome planting in a modern outdoor space?

The individual plants have an amazing architecture to them, but they’re fairly slow growing. My representative of this species in the back yard is probably fifteen years old and only about five feet tall. The plants in the picture must be fifteen feet tall and have a few decades apiece–not the sort of planting you’d be able to put together in an afternoon’s shopping at the local garden center…