The constant gardener

For Piet Oudolf, acknowledged leader of the New Perennials landscape movement, architectural plants chosen for their form and structure rather than their colour are the basis of his deeply philosophical designs

Words Jan-Carlos Kucharek | Images Piet Oudolf

It’s just after lunchtime in Hummelo, the Netherlands, and Anja Oudolf, having answered my phone call, is carrying the handset through the audible bustle of her nursery shop to pass me over to her husband, Piet. It becomes obvious to me at that moment that the man is never far from either his wife or his gardens – a strange paradox, considering that over the last 40 of his 66 years he has moved a huge metaphorical distance: from experimenting on his own with shrubs and grasses in the privacy of his back garden, to becoming the living embodiment of the whole ‘New Perennials’ landscape movement; with gardens in his native Holland, the UK and more noteworthy, America, which shows him branching out with a wholly different climate and landscape tradition.

His latest creation, opened to the public last September, can be seen sailing through the high-rise urban blocks of Lower Manhattan. The High Line was formerly a disused elevated section of train track, a barren landscape of rust and decay, transformed through vigorous fundraising and the efforts of architect Diller Scofidio + Renfro, landscape designer Field Operations, and the hand of plantsman Oudolf, into a long, soft, dreamy sliver of meadowland raised above the city. The surreal juxtaposition of the two is shocking in its simplicity, and for the quiet yet brooding Piet, you sense that it is for this reason, rather than the physical scale of its ambition or its timeliness, that he declares it his favourite project to date. ‘It’s far more daring than anything I’ve done previously,’ he tells me, ‘Practically, I had to deal with a limited soil ecology right in the centre of a hard urban environment, and design it for people who might never have ever really left the city environment. But the High Line is also highly conceptual – a reconnection with something lost and an attempt to expose people to a beauty they may have never experienced before.’

And, as they say, charity begins at home. Oudolf’s Hummelo farmhouse and one acre of garden remain the hotbed for his investigations into the nature of the modern landscape – here in vignette are all the thinking, formal devices, shrubs and flowers he uses, in the greatest traditions of landscape, to act as a metaphor for human birth, life and death. In that vein, it is a work that has matured and changed with him – yet to look at Oudolf’s gardens is to feel the sap of youth rising, simultaneously with the formal structures of mid-life and sagacity of old age. His fascination with forcing us to be witness to the death of plants allows the viewer the space to contemplate the joy of their life.

‘I like to connect people with the processes of their own lives. What it takes humans a lifetime to experience, a plant will experience in its own yearly life cycle. In that sense, gardening is a microcosm of life,’ he says.  As he speaks I am unsure if Oudolf is a god-fearing man, but there is a deeply philosophical, if not religious, basis to the landscapes he creates.

Oudolf’s fundamental doctrine is that a plant’s form and structure are more important than its colour, and his use of perennials underpins this philosophy. No dense flower borders to be seen here then – his gardens are characterised by the use of natural wild grasses like Pennisetum and Malepartus, which form the cantus firmus and bed of his work. Interspersed among these peep the heads of Clematis Cassandra, Agastache Nepetoides ‘Blue Fortune’ to provide visual highlights. Behind, the huge lethargic sinusoidal curves of Oudolf’s tall box hedges are a counterpoint to the barely present flat line of the Dutch landscape beyond, like Le Nôtre on Novocaine. And while there is a signature formalism to his all his landscapes, it is not based on artifice. ‘If a plant turns brown over time, physically and psychologically that’s how it should be,’ he muses. ‘A tree in winter without its leaves still looks good, and my work is about consciously attuning the viewer’s mind to that fact.’

After various casual jobs, Oudolf started working in a nursery aged 26 and fell in love with plants from that moment. Not having studied the subject academically, he claims his approach to landscape design has always been instinctive and experimental, although as the figurehead of the New Perennials movement he is automatically associated with the likes of Irish garden designer William Robinson (1838-1935), who, in an age of the glass house and the high Victorian pattern garden, pioneered the notion of the ‘wild garden’– one dominated by hardy perennials, and native plants and flowers, to create landscapes that were a natural parallel of and complement to the architecture of the English arts and crafts movement. Oudolf likes to defy the simple categorisation however, feeling that attitudes and approaches have to be understood in the context of time.

‘Outside the context of traditional garden history, I just did what I wanted,’ he says. ‘When I started gardening, of course I visited gardens and estates, and was obviously influenced by them, but I wanted to escape their formalism. I’ve never wanted to follow the rules of planting, but I can’t break from them without acknowledging they exist or without using the many skills that are part of its history.’

But beyond his own ideas of ‘idealised nature’, Oudolf is a pragmatist, saying his concepts are never fixed from the outset, but respond to the raw landscape, climate, nature of the client and complexity of the brief. In this, projects like New York’s Battery Park or the High Line – highly public, exposed and relatively unmaintained, demand robustness and hardiness that a private garden, such as that at Scampston Hall in Yorkshire, would simply not require.

The UK seems to have taken warmly to Oudolf, with the designer having been commissioned to design significant areas of both Scampston (2002) and Trentham Park in Norfolk (2007), as well as borders at the Royal Horticultural Society’s Wisley HQ in Surrey, although these last were substantially altered in later garden layouts. At Scampston Hall in particular Oudolf saw his design coming out of the garden’s former history, where he chose to honour the hall’s walled garden, while letting the garden spill out into the landscape beyond its confines. So the visitor approaching the garden passes through sublime, hazy waves of flowering grass Molinia Caerulea ‘Karl Foerster’, that through each season gently waft you to the eight formal components of the walled garden. What’s inside has been universally hailed in landscaping circles as a triumph. Oudolf’s flowering perennials are all there, but placed within a formal language of ‘garden rooms’, paying homage to traditional French and Italian influences, with a decidedly contemporary twist. Here are four topiary gardens, yews clipped as columns, a ‘Serpentine Garden’, where those same yews are cut again into those sinusoidal curves, and even a pyramidal mound allowing the viewer to gain a greater understanding of the garden’s formality, from a birdseye point of view. Everywhere robust perennials abound.

And, unlike the husks of his flower heads, the work is far from drying up. New designs in the pipeline include gardens for Frank Gehry’s Beekman Towers in New York as well as the second phase of the High Line, Skarholmen Garden, a pocket park in suburban Stockholm, and a museum park in Bad Driburg, Holland. All in their own way constitute a reinterpretation of the local context and history.

But reinterpreting the past is only one facet of Oudolf’s skills – the man is also germinating a future. Futureplants.com, of which Oudolf is a business partner, is a collective of four nurseries bringing together all the perennials integral to his landscape repertoire. And he has used his selection of native American plants, sourced through seedbanks across the pond, to add to its already extensive catalogue. In this way, Oudolf is not only formally cross-referencing, but cross fertilising and cross-pollinating too, putting names to over 70 new breeds of plant.

‘Futureplants allows me to put all these plants into mass propagation, and acts as an escape for me to get my plants out into the world,’ he adds, his virtual nursery being part of the ‘fourth dimension of time’ the designer sees as critical to his all work. In a way you feel it is a way for Oudolf to stamp his authenticity and approval on a design process he acknowledges never ends, and which is, as it matures over time, is subject to the vagaries of others. On collaborative working with architects and landscape designers, Oudolf won’t be told.

‘The job needs to be divided along clear lines,’ he says. ‘You can sympathise with their ideas, but in doing so you cannot compromise yourself and yours – compromise is not to your benefit. I’ve spent 40 years working with plants, and in that time I have learned what does and doesn’t work.’ It is precisely this uncompromising approach that has earned him such international respect, and has kept him exploring the nature of the contemporary landscape, despite his senior years. And for the designer, who guards the authorship of his work so preciously, relinquishing control over his landscapes must be a difficult thing.
Perhaps Futureplants.com then, is a conduit for that need for control, as he silently dictates the nature of germination, before going viral and releasing them on a waiting world.