The American nurseryman and designer on the beauty of prairie planting, becoming Piet Oudolf ’s right-hand man and championing gravel gardens. Words: Tony Spencer, Portrait: Sabrina Rothe
In his twenties, Roy Diblik would regularly volunteer at the 100-acre prairie meadow at the Morton Arboretum on the outskirts of his home city of Chicago. One of the oldest tall-grass restorations in the American Midwest, it was curated by Ray Schulenberg, after whom it’s now named. Roy remembers when, in 1981, Ray asked him to help lay the narrowest of paths through its planting. “It was early in the year and the prairie plants were just emerging after the fire,” he recalls. “Ray said: ‘I just want it one cinder block wide because I want people to walk through there and I want the plants to touch them.’ He wanted people to feel the intimacy of plants.”
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Roy shares that enthusiasm for bringing people and plants together, although his own path to becoming a noted plantsman and designer wasn’t always so immersed in plants. He grew up in the working-class neighbourhood of Berwin, Chicago, where he says “everyone worked hard… and went bowling”, but his Czech mother insisted the family get out of the city every summer for fishing trips, and road trips to National Parks.
His first job was in outdoor education, taking children from inner-city projects to a camp in a large forest preserve. “You were surrounded by beauty with the kids responding to things they’d never seen before,” he says. “Doing stuff like running through a creek barefoot or staying up past dark where they couldn’t see their hands in front of their face.”
After the programme folded in 1976, Roy was hired as the grounds supervisor in charge of the Park District in St Charles, a small town west of Chicago. He had been in the job two years when his boss asked him to manage the Natural Garden, a local nursery he had bought. Roy knew next to nothing about plants, but the nursery’s founder, Walter Stephen, stuck around to teach Roy all about them, with perennials dug straight from the ground.
A gifted copy of Gardening with Grasses by Piet Oudolf and Michael King changed everything for Roy
Roy visited the Morton Arboretum on a day off from the nursery and, enraptured by the beauty of the prairie plants in Ray Schulenberg’s meadow, signed up as a volunteer. He asked Ray how he could get these plants to the public. “You can try,” replied Ray, “but they’ll never sell.” Roy did try, making the Natural Garden the first nursery in the Midwest to put young native prairie plants into pots. For two years, he could only give them away, but by the time Roy left in 1991, the nursery was selling 300,000 of them a year.
After 13 years at the Natural Garden, Roy was ready to set up his own nursery, Northwind Perennial Farm in Wisconsin, with partners Colleen Garrigan and Steve Coster. At the time, his heroes were British gardeners Graham Stuart Thomas and Christopher Lloyd, along with German horticulturists Richard Hansen and Friedrich Stahl, the authors of Perennials and their Garden Habitats. But it was a gifted copy of Gardening with Grasses by Piet Oudolf and Michael King that changed everything for Roy, because, he says, it was “about looking at prairie with a higher aesthetic”.
In 2001 Roy met Piet Oudolf in person when the Dutch designer came to Northwind in search of a local source to grow 26,000 perennials for the Lurie Garden in Chicago’s Millennium Park. “Piet rolled out the plans for the Lurie in our potting shed on a table,” recalls Roy, “and when he rolled it out, the whole plan became 3D.”
The two plantsmen immediately hit it off and Roy remembers taking him to visit the Schulenberg Prairie in late June. “Piet was really moved by the look and the scale of the big prairie with Baptisia lactea as far as you could see, and the cones of Echinacea pallida coming up. I think that moved him to redesign the meadow at the Lurie.” Roy has been Oudolf ’s trusted right-hand man ever since on many US-based projects, most recently for the Oudolf Garden Detroit.
That’s when I saw the gravel gardens,” he says. “I was amazed. Who’s doing this in America? Nobody.
Roy became a designer by default when a client asked him to create a native planting with one caveat: “Can you make it look good?” Challenge accepted. This led Roy to develop his grid-based ‘Know Maintenance’ system for planting design, easily adaptable to any average-sized garden and local conditions. At heart though, he is still a grower, who is wild about Carex and has introduced several plants to the trade, including Allium angulosum ‘Summer Beauty’, Panicum virgatum ‘Northwind’ and Sporobolus heterolepis ‘Tara’.
In 2008, he toured Hermannshof in Germany with its then director Cassian Schmidt. “That’s when I saw the gravel gardens,” he says. “I was amazed. Who’s doing this in America? Nobody. So I did one as soon as I got back to Northwind.” Today, gravel gardens are finally on the rise in the USA, thanks in no small part to Roy.
Now aged 71, he divides his time between Northwind, new design projects and teaching the next generation at local colleges. “Now the highlight is sharing stewardship. How do you care for this stuff?” he says. “Our biggest need is people knowing how to interpret the relationships between the plants when they’re hoeing. It’s not just weeding.” When he talks about growing plants in communities, Roy speaks in terms of love, health and intimacy, his gravelly voice drawing you in, leading you ever further down that prairie path he has laid, to bring as many as possible closer to the joy of plants.
Find out more about Roy’s work at northwindperennialfarm.com
He is currently working on the Sears Sunken Garden in Chicago with his wife Annamaria Leon and Piet Oudolf. searssunkengarden.org