Over the past six months, I’ve been utterly absorbed in the making of a woodland garden on the edge of our one-acre pond in the rolling hills of Mono, Ontario.
Early in the process, I was doubly fortunate to get advice on my plans from two maestros of modern planting design, Piet Oudolf and Roy Diblik.
My last post on this topic introduced them as plantsmen and people. This time, it’s about the design process and how they helped push my ideas forward with some stellar advice and insights.
Boo! It’s that time of year again when pagan festivals, monster horror films, and religious holidays all converge into an unholy clash.
From Hallowe’en to Night of the Living Dead to El Dia de Muerte, there’s something sweetly macabre about our autumnal obsession to summon forth the denizens of the spirit world and celebrate the enigma of life beyond the grave.
With all this morbidity sanctifying the air, it makes me wonder: What about our gardens? Do they really die each year? Or is it more like a form of reincarnation?
Ah. Welcome to the New Perennialist Theatre. Your seat is waiting. We have three remarkable art films ready for viewing – two short and the third is feature length.
Admission is free. Popcorn is strictly optional. Leave your secateurs at the door.
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.
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.
