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.
Yoo-hoo winter. Where are you? Can you come out to play?
Here in Toronto, you’ve been pretty much a no-show. Temperatures yesterday shot up to a record-breaking 15.5C for this date in February. The only snow in town are Snowdrops (Galanthus), which are strangely starting to bloom– months ahead of schedule.
For gardeners, winter is anything but dormant. It’s a season to dream, learn, think, and plan. Literally sowing the seeds for a new season of possibility.
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.
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.
