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Results for Piet Oudolf

Piet Oudolf At Work: A Conversation

Right from its plain brown-wrap cover, the new book ‘Piet Oudolf At Work’ strikes a different chord in how it chooses to show and tell its story.

Oudolf has always been a visual thinker and his creative process is both far more abstract, complex and subtle than can easily be described in words. So instead of verbiage, At Work visually walks us through each phase of the design process, as the landscapes he envisions in his mind make the creative leap to colour-coded plans on paper.

This is his first book to delve into such depth, openly sharing plans from nearly 30 projects in the largest collection of his drawings ever published.

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Wildscaping: The Home Edition

Over the past few years, I’ve been too busy making new gardens to actually find the time to write about them. We’re only now at a point where I can sit down to share something of the bigger picture.

The unspoken reality is we’ve been immersed in making a series of garden spaces from scratch, diverse in both scale and habitat, but all linked by this idea of wildscaping. Up till now, only friends and visitors have seen fragments of the work in progress.

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Wildscaping: A Post-Earth Day Dream

Our perennial challenge is how to design plant-driven garden landscapes to express a wilder beauty while fulfilling ecological imperatives to spark biodiversity and feed the soul. 

We want to dream big and be practical all at the same time. 

To this end, I’ve captured and pulled together some of the more glowing threads from the hyperactive global conversation on how to plan, realize, and sustain designed landscapes in the public and private realm.

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Closing Time: Goodbye to Hummelo

After nearly 40 years of welcoming the world through its gates, the private garden of Piet and Anja Oudolf at Hummelo will close to the public for good at the end of this month.

For all lovers of this most quintessential garden that galvanized an entire movement in naturalistic planting design, the news cuts deep.

Word of its closing has spread like wildfire-weed amongst garden folk and it’s inspired a kind of spontaneous pilgrimage of people visiting Kwekerij Oudolf one last time.

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The Red Trowel: A Journey with Piet Oudolf & Friends

I pursed my lips in quiet victory. At the ungodly hour of 5:30 a.m. on a Friday morning in April, my trowel and I glided through U.S. Customs to dig into my New Perennial opportunity of the year: a chance to help plant out a Piet Oudolf-designed botanic garden in Delaware.

One week later standing in his future meadow, I had the chance to ask Piet Oudolf himself that most basic of questions: “So Piet, how do you like to plant?”

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