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In April 2011 , a sojourn to Piet and Anja Oudolf ’s home was an unexpected opportunity for me to find out the couple lie in out a new department of garden . Piet and his home have hold up in an old farmhouse at Hummelo , in eastern Netherlands , since 1982 , and I have been a regular guest there since 1994 . As the garden has developed and changed over the days , I have observed how every alteration reflect Piet ’s ongoing evolution as a designer . This especial change entailed creating a garden from a patch of land that had been a sales area for their nursery business . It was , in a way , the end of an era . The nursery was central to Piet and Anja ’s aliveness for eld , the plants they chose to grow and betray having played as much a part in launching Piet ’s calling as a globally known garden designer as the garden themselves .
After Piet and Anja Oudolf closed their 6,000 - square - foot baby’s room , it leave an empty place . Writer Noel Kingsbury was fortunate to see its " wild " transformation . SEE MORE photograph OF THIS GARDEN
Closing the nursery in 2010 left a roughly 6,000 - straightforward - foot area of piteous loamy and flaxen land between the farmhouse and Piet ’s office building , and an inevitable question in the line . The conditions on the weekend of my sojourn was clear and gay — perfect conditions for setting out on a young project . I view as Piet began sate the empty space by planting Calamagrostis ‘ Karl Foerster ’ , an ornamental Mary Jane well shew as give a foresightful season , providing a powerfully erect optical element , and being very wind resistant in sure soil condition . The Calamagrostis “ echoed the plantings around the office building , ” Piet explained . Other plants ( very strong perennials that could contend with aboriginal and ad-lib vegetation ) conk in at some distance from each other , more or less willy-nilly . They include latterly - bloom robust perennial , but also former one like Monarda bradburyana , which flower from the first of June . Between the grass and perennial , Piet then sowed a hayfield mixture produce by the Dutch company Cruydt - Hoeck containing Dutch native grasses and wildflower perennials , such as Dianthus carthusianorum and Valeriana officinalis .
My next visit was in August . The perennials were grow powerfully , and the pot and the first of the wild flower were getting established , admit wild chamomile and yarrow . As I walk past the plant , I realized that to the uninitiated , it might look like a garden that had been invaded by wildflowers . Or was it the other way around , a raving mad grassy area being made into a garden ?
Fluffy plumes ofDeschampsia caespitosagrass fix off the silhouette of dark late - seasonVeratrum californicum , a handsome , lifelike plant when left to go to seed . ( Photo by : Philippe Perdereau)SEE MORE PHOTOS OF THIS GARDEN
This was definitely an unlawful plant combination . So why do it ? “ It was about a create a answer , ” order Piet , “ less maintenance for the hereafter , and an experiment to see how robust perennials would grow with aboriginal forage and wildflowers . ” frame that elbow room , the unexampled garden begin to make a lot of sense . I could see how the ornamental locoweed , include Calamagrostis , Panicum virgatum ( the prairie coinage known as switchgrass ) , and Festuca mairei ( a drouth - tolerant species from North Africa ) would provide long - term introductory structure . And the flowers with acute colour — the grim steeple of camassia and the cryptic magenta - pink of the crane’s bill Geranium ‘ Patricia ’ — would be specially striking when seen dotted around in Gunter Wilhelm Grass .
The dominant unfolding time of year is from June to October . Many of the perennial are mintage of North American origin , reverberate the long fascination Europeans have had with the continent ’s plant . There are aster , species of Eutrochium ( Joe Pye locoweed ) , Helenium ( sneezeweed ) , Vernonia ( vernonia ) , and relatively fresh in cultivation here , Monarda bradburiana ( Eastern bee balm ) . “ The grass are slowly spreading among the perennial , ” say Piet . “ It will become like a recurrent meadow . ” Key to the aesthetic is the random location of the perennials . Except that it is not random , but the outcome of Piet ’s visceral placing of plant to create a subtle underlying ordering . delineate that parliamentary law , I thought to myself , would probably take a Ph.D. and a very powerful computer . Better just to savour it .
Eutrochium maculatum‘Purple Bush ’ ( Joe Pye grass ): A noble aboriginal of America with inviolable structure and flowers that bloom well into late dusk , followed by attractive glum seed promontory . ( exposure by : Philippe Perdereau)SEE MORE PHOTOS OF THIS GARDEN
naturalise garden perennial among a grass - dominated raving mad flora has long been a dream of gardeners , but has rarely been done successfully . In his Holy Scripture The Wild Garden , the Irish journalist William Robinson promoted the idea back in 1870 that garden and wild could somehow amalgamate . However , the trouble has always been that the lastingness and tenacity of European native grasses ( now , of course , introduce and widespread in North America ) make it very hard for nonnative perennials to survive in their midst . Piet is more probable to succeed by not watering much , and for the counterintuitive reason that the territory underlying the sometime nursery area is comparatively miserable , so the maturation of the native grasses will be subjugate , giving the perennials more probability to compete and so to thrive .
The new garden is the late stair in Piet ’s originative journey . When he came to Hummelo he had already been a garden designer all his working life , but in a clearly architectural style . ( At the time , garden invention in the Netherlands was reign by Mien Ruys , a gifted and prolific landscape designer who used a spacious orbit of plants strongly framed by geometrically clipped shrubs — a distinctively Modernist rendering of a traditional European garden art form . ) start in the 1980s , Piet start to work more and more with perennials , but with occasional counterpoint cylinder block of nip off foliage . Examples of this plant shaping could until recently still be see in the new garden in the frame of blocks of weeping ash grey pear Pyrus salicifolia ‘ Pendula ’ .
For many year , Piet used perennial in distinct clumps of one variety . Gradually he begin to make for with scatter cardinal plants throughout a site and creating some areas where works varieties were intermingled . He explored these ideas in the Lurie Garden in Chicago , completed in 2004 . Since then he has worked extensively on creating a sophisticated , nature - inspired blend of perennial varieties — an coming apparent in his workplace at New York ’s High Line . The “ repeated meadow ” experimentation at Hummelo look like the recent footprint in a journey that has become wilder and wilder .
Related Reading : Q&A with Piet OudolfPiet Oudolf ’s Garden for the 2011 Serpentine Gallery PavilionHigh Line , Part II , OpensNew York ’s finish High Line
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