This is a movement which belongs to no one.
In truth, because the New Perennial movement can belong to anyone and everyone.
First and foremost, it’s about seeing plants in all their four-dimensional splendour and experiencing the slow-motion fireworks, which ensue as they flow and interact.
You don’t need a garden to do that. Just the pupils in your eyes.
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.
Few tourists think to visit Groningen, the northernmost capital of the Netherlands.
My tattered copy of Lonely Planet lists the main local activity in the sparsely populated region as wadlopen or mud-walking out in the open flats of the North Sea. They also mention something about pig farms.
From what I saw, they’re missing out. Because Groningen also happens to be an ideal base from which to explore an alternate universe of garden design. And that’s exactly what we set out to do last July on the ‘Gardens Illustrated Tour of the Dutch Northern provinces ‘ led by English garden writer, Noel Kingsbury and his wife, Jo Elliott.
