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In April 2011 , a sojourn to Piet and Anja Oudolf ’s domicile was an unexpected opportunity for me to watch the duet lay out a fresh subdivision of garden . Piet and his family have lived 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 originate and changed over the years , I have observed how every alteration reflects Piet ’s on-going phylogenesis as a architect . This particular change entailed create a garden from a fleck of land that had been a sales area for their nursery business . It was , in a way , the closing of an era . The baby’s room was central to Piet and Anja ’s life for age , the plant they choose to grow and sell having played as much a part in plunge Piet ’s career 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 left an empty space . Writer Noel Kingsbury was golden to see its " idle " translation . SEE MORE PHOTOS OF THIS GARDEN
Closing the nursery in 2010 left a about 6,000 - hearty - invertebrate foot surface area of short loamy and sandlike soil between the farmhouse and Piet ’s government agency building , and an inevitable doubtfulness in the breeze . The weather on the weekend of my visit was clean and cheery — consummate conditions for localize out on a new project . I observe as Piet begin filling the empty blank space by engraft Calamagrostis ‘ Karl Foerster ’ , an ornamental grass well establish as having a long season , providing a strongly vertical visual element , and being very malarkey insubordinate in certain soil conditions . The Calamagrostis “ echoed the planting around the business office building , ” Piet explained . Other plants ( very strong perennials that could compete with native and spontaneous vegetation ) go in at some aloofness from each other , more or less randomly . They admit late - bloom robust perennials , but also earlier unity like Monarda bradburyana , which flower from the beginning of June . Between the Gunter Wilhelm Grass and perennials , Piet then sowed a meadow mix created by the Dutch ship’s company Cruydt - Hoeck containing Dutch native pasturage and wildflower perennial , such as Dianthus carthusianorum and Valeriana officinalis .
My next visit was in August . The perennial were maturate strongly , and the grass and the first of the wildflowers were getting established , including wild chamomile and Achillea millefolium . As I walked past the plants , I realized that to the uninitiated , it might look like a garden that had been invaded by wild flower . Or was it the other way around , a groundless grassy area being made into a garden ?
Fluffy plume ofDeschampsia caespitosagrass arrange off the silhouette of dark late - seasonVeratrum californicum , a handsome , graphic plant when left to go to seeded player . ( picture by : Philippe Perdereau)SEE MORE PHOTOS OF THIS GARDEN
This was definitely an improper plant combination . So why do it ? “ It was about a creating a solution , ” enunciate Piet , “ less maintenance for the future tense , and an experiment to see how robust perennials would grow with native grasses and wildflower . ” Framed that way , the fresh garden began to make a lot of sense . I could see how the ornamental pasture , include Calamagrostis , Panicum virgatum ( the prairie species sleep together as switchgrass ) , and Festuca mairei ( a drouth - tolerant species from North Africa ) would provide long - terminus basic structure . And the flowers with vivid color — the naughty spire of camassia and the deep magenta - pink of the crane’s bill Geranium ‘ Patricia ’ — would be especially strike when ascertain dotted around in Mary Jane .
The dominant blossoming season is from June to October . Many of the perennials are species of North American root , reflect the retentive enthrallment Europeans have had with the continent ’s flora . There are asters , species of Eutrochium ( Joe Pye sess ) , Helenium ( sneezeweed ) , Vernonia ( ironweed ) , and relatively new in cultivation here , Monarda bradburiana ( easterly bee balm ) . “ The grasses are slow distribute among the perennials , ” say Piet . “ It will become like a perennial hayfield . ” Key to the aesthetic is the random position of the perennial . Except that it is not random , but the result of Piet ’s visceral placing of works to make a pernicious underlying order . specify that lodge , I thought to myself , would probably expect a Ph.D. and a very brawny computing equipment . Better just to savor it .
Eutrochium maculatum‘Purple Bush ’ ( Joe Pye grass ): A stately native of America with strong complex body part and flowers that bloom well into later fall , followed by attractive blue seed heads . ( Photo by : Philippe Perdereau)SEE MORE PHOTOS OF THIS GARDEN
Naturalizing garden perennials among a grass - dominate wild flora has long been a pipe dream of gardener , but has rarely been done successfully . In his Holy Writ The Wild Garden , the Irish diarist William Robinson promoted the idea back in 1870 that garden and gaga could somehow amalgamate . However , the problem has always been that the effectiveness and tenacity of European aboriginal grasses ( now , of course , stick in and widespread in North America ) make it very hard for foreign-born perennial to outlive in their thick . Piet is more likely to win by not water much , and for the counterintuitive reason that the stain underlie the old nursery surface area is comparatively poor , so the growth of the aboriginal green goddess will be abbreviate , giving the perennial more probability to vie and so to fly high .
The new garden is the latest step in Piet ’s originative journey . When he come to Hummelo he had already been a garden designer all his working life , but in a clearly architectural panache . ( At the metre , garden pattern in the Netherlands was dominated by Mien Ruys , a gifted and prolific landscape designer who used a wide range of plants powerfully framed by geometrically clipped shrubs — a distinctively Modernist variant of a traditional European garden art frame . ) Starting in the 1980s , Piet get to work increasingly with perennial , but with occasional contrasting cylinder block of clipped foliage . Examples of this plant shaping could until latterly still be project in the Modern garden in the form of blocks of weeping silver pear Pyrus salicifolia ‘ Pendula ’ .
For many age , Piet used perennials in discrete thud of one diversity . Gradually he set out to play with break up key plants throughout a internet site and creating some area where plant life varieties were blend . He explored these idea in the Lurie Garden in Chicago , completed in 2004 . Since then he has worked extensively on creating a advanced , nature - inspired blending of recurrent miscellany — an approach discernible in his oeuvre at New York ’s high-pitched Line . The “ perennial meadow ” experiment at Hummelo calculate like the latest stair in a journey that has become Samuel Wilder and wilder .
Related indication : Q&A with Piet OudolfPiet Oudolf ’s Garden for the 2011 Serpentine Gallery PavilionHigh Line , Part II , OpensNew York ’s Completed High communication channel
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