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.
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?”
It’s the movement that never stops moving.
Stepping into 2018, the New Perennial movement in naturalistic planting design continues to creep, climb, bloom, and seed its way around the civilized world all the way from Scandinavia and Eastern Europe to Canada, the U.S., South America, China, New Zealand, and beyond.
In every pocket, there’s a growing convergence of design, ecology, and architecture along with a deepening sense of what is possible and why it matters more than ever before (i.e. the lopsided battle to restore quality of life for all species on the home planet.)
If you’re curious to try out a more naturalistic approach to planting design, here are some practical hacks to help you get the root ball rolling
Since many gardeners are likely working with a current gardens vs. the freedom of a fresh canvas, these ideas can help you test out some smaller projects and experiments over time.
In Part One of this post, I talked about the concept of seeing plants differently: in terms of beauty and purpose, and the roles they can play within a biodiverse plant community.
It’s about setting aside our desire for control to instead work in partnership with nature. This is essentially the guiding principle behind the naturalistic garden, a plant-driven approach to landscape design that has been around in one form or another since Englishman William Robinson first published his first edition of The Wild Garden in 1870.
But now with signature projects like the High Line in New York City and Chicago’s Lurie Garden, a growing global movement in planting design has found a bolder, modernist expression of this ideal with a collective dream to re-wild our nature-deprived urban worlds.
