The Garden Club of Michigan asked me if I was interested to do a garden and that’s how it came about. Detroit is a city I was always interested in and I had never been, and it was just recovering from all the things from the past. It was the combination of exploring the city and creating a garden. The city is very interesting. W*:You have said, ‘Planting is good therapy for the times we live in.’What do you mean by that?

Five Seasons: The Gardens of Piet Oudolf (2017) is a documentary directed by Thomas Piper following gardens designed by Piet Oudolf through five seasons. [17] [18] Awards [ edit ] At the age of 79 he’s still working as hard as ever and is currently engaged in three very different projects: one a community garden in a mixed neighbourhood in Chicago, another in Berlin with the artist Katherina Grosse and a third in Philadelphia, which sees him teaming up with the architects Herzog & de Meuron on a project dedicated to the art and ideas of Alexander Calder, one of the most innovative and influential artists of the 20th century. The stability of perennials after planting are key to Oudolf's designs, especially the use of long-lived clump-forming species. The result are gardens that persist in their planned state years after being planted, with little deviation from Oudolf's hand drawn maps. [5] [6] Piet Oudolf At Work] juxtaposes detailed photography with the largest collection of his drawings ever published, generously offering a Technicolor road map to his oft-imitated schemes.’– Architectural Digest I also liked how the entire text is subtly annotated to cross-reference with specific drawings or garden profiles. This is a book designed to be read from start to finish and for flipping betwixt and between. Higher ArtI had to smile when I saw how At Work uses a series of such Oudolfian quotes to frame the chapters, with their staggered type echoing the spatial play of his planting design. “A garden isn’t a landscape painting that you look at, It was never a movement in the usual sense of the word, which has clearly defined objectives. Everyone was (and is) too individualistic for that. It was rather a counter-movement, the most important elements of which were, in the words of Rob Leopold: natural diversity, individual values of perception and artistic development’. In other words, a ‘movement’ therefore that puts an end to all previous movements and their strictly prescribed rules.

In the second part of our interview with the Dutch garden artist he talks about working with Peter Zumthor, how climate change does and doesn’t affect his planting, and the most important part of his job (it’s not what you think it is)

Horticulturalist and fellow Phaidon author Toby Musgrave has a question: Could the New Perennial approach be successfully applied to planting design using tropical flora? Oudolf has always been a visual thinker and his creative process is both far more abstract, complex and subtle than can easily be described in words. Dream Plants for the Natural Garden (2000) with Henk Gerritsen–originally published in the Netherlands under the title Méér Droomplanten (1999) Piet’s collection of mugs filled with markers and coloured pencils is parked over to the side. There we are, eating our herring at the very wooden table where Piet has sketch by sketch, plan by plan and landscape by landscape, done much to artfully rewild our perception of gardens in the modern public sphere. Hans Ulrich Obrist: Piet, it would be great to hear more about your own garden at Hummelo [in the Dutch province of Gelderland], because I know you’ve left it to change freely with the seasons, in a very organic way. I’ve always been interested in the idea of how to negotiate control and not control, or organization and self-organization. Was that a methodology that was honed in this laboratory of your own garden?

For just this reason, Piet told me that the first essay by Cassian Schmidt is of particular importance to help people understand not only what he does now, but where it comes from.

Anja pops in to say hello and then vanishes off to curl up in the farmhouse with her weekend newspaper. Planting the Natural Garden (2003) with Henk Gerritsen, revised (2019) with Noel Kingsbury–originally published in the Netherlands under the title Droomplanten (1992) Hans Ulrich Obrist is the ultra-influential Director of the Serpentine Gallery in London while Tino Sehgal is a Berlin-based artist of German and Indian descent regarded as a leading international figure in the realm of live arts.

For those of us fortunate enough to visit Hummelo over the years, the experience was often revelatory and near impossible to put into words. Confidence. You have to be confident. You can doubt yourself many times during the process whether you can do it, but when a client comes to you and has a question about a particular area, they want to do with you or to make a garden you have to be confident. You cannot say to clients ‘maybe I can do something.’ You have to feel confident from the moment; you say ‘yes’. The doubts may mostly come later in the process when you think through all the details and the process. But then you work it out. It is probably an exaggeration to say everyone has walked through a Piet Oudolf garden. But, hundreds of millions of people have: The Dutch landscape designer is the mastermind behind New York City’s High Line and Battery Park, Chicago’s Lurie Garden in Millennium Park, London’s Queen Elizabeth Park, the entry to Toronto’s Botanical Garden, and the Vitra Campus in Southwest Germany. (Just to name a few.) Currently, most consider him the most famous person in his field. “I always had a strong feeling that I could do something different,” Oudolf previously said. “That happened when I met plants.”He also makes a convincing case that it may ultimately be Piet’s lesser recognized design work with woody plants and trees vs. matrix meadows that will stand the test of time. That will surely confuse future critics! High Line Image credit: Awoiska van der Molen) W*:Can you tell me about current projects, including Vitra garden you are creating, and the Detroit Oudolf Garden in Michigan? He knew there was really only one person who could fulfil his dream of a rural landscape atop urban life. A Dutchman called Piet Oudolf, whom Corner characterized as ‘a master of his medium and a singular genius in terms of plants and planting design. Or, as he once described in more prosaic terms, “a really good chef who knows his ingredients.”