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The New Perennialist: A Moment in the Sun

Two weeks back, I met up with 70 of my peers coming to Toronto from all over North America for the annual Garden Bloggers Fling.

It’s a gathering of the tribe to meet up in a different host city each year, visit gardens, talk plants, eat some great food, and grab some amazing swag.

The next week by pure coincidence, I was stunned to learn that The New Perennialist had received a 2015 Garden Writers Association Silver Award of Achievement for ‘Best Overall Blog’.

It’s also eligible to win Gold at the 67th GWA Annual Symposium in Pasadena, California this September.

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Shady Chic: A Montréal Rendezvous

Montréal! Ooh la la. Cultured, sophisticated, and yes, a little bit seedy. With a history of bootlegging, speakeasies, jazz clubs, hockey dynasties, and organized crime.

But also seedy in a good way as the home to the Montréal Botanical Garden.

Truth be told, Le Jardin Botanique Montréal is my horticultural mistress par excellence.

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Hermannshof: The German Genius for Goals and Gardens

Yes, they did it again. In early July, under the blinding stadium lights in Rio, Germany conquered Argentina with a soaring pass and mid-air kick to win the 2014 FIFA World Cup. The German team was so strong, the win seemed almost inevitable.

On a whirlwind visit to Germany last summer, I discovered they also make seriously innovative public gardens – and much like football, their greatness is no accident.

Each is the result of a highly diligent work ethic, meticulous research and planning, creativity, and a genius for practical innovation. One garden unites all these elements together into one exquisitely satisfying whole, while the other radically deconstructs them into something perhaps more strange than merely beautiful.

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Bringing Hummelo Home

How far will a keen perennial gardener go in the search for new ideas?

Lately, it’s far beyond my own garden gate, and recently involved plane, train and taxi rides all the way to the tiny village of Hummelo in the eastern Netherlands.

I arrived there early one morning last July to be welcomed by none other than Piet Oudolf, the silver-maned Dutch lion of modern landscape design, standing outside his rust-coloured brick farmhouse.

Thrilled to be there and yet not knowing quite what to expect, I was one of a diverse group of 25 landscape designers and avid gardeners from as far away as New Zealand, Argentina, Sweden, the U.S. and Europe there to participate in a one-day intensive planting design workshop led by Piet and his writerly counterpart, Noel Kingsbury.

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Netherlanders III: The Oudolf Effect

My first glimpse of Rotterdam was a blast of pure future shock.

Walking out of the concrete slab and webbed glass roof of the Centraal train station, the cityscape comes on like a massive architectural experiment gone wild.

Now down to the final few days of my trip, I’d come south in mid-July to visit two of Piet Oudolf’s most recent public projects in the Netherlands. While these gardens express some of his latest design thinking, they’re not yet so well known to the outside world.

A powerful juxtaposition of nature recast in a hypermodern urban frame.

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