He was in his twenties, working in his parents\u2019 restaurant, and unhappy, when he decided to find a different career, and tried out various jobs in a fishery, a steel factory and a garden centre. It was there that he became interested in gardening, and began to buy plants. \u201cWithin a year I was addicted,\u201d he says. \u201cI wanted to know everything. So I went back to school in the evening for four years, and studied to get qualifications so I could start my own business building gardens.\u201d<\/p> After several years as a contractor, and frustrated at not being able to source the plants he wanted for his projects, Piet looked for somewhere he could grow them himself. \u201cThat was how we found this place, a derelict farmhouse in Hummelo,\u201d he explains. He started his nursery in 1982 with horticulturist Romke van de Kaa, who had worked at RHS Wisley and also Great Dixter<\/a> under Christopher Lloyd<\/a>, and designing gardens took a backseat as the pair looked for interesting plants to grow. \u201cIn the beginning, it was an adventure,\u201d Oudolf says. \u201cEverywhere we went, we found new plants. We also collected seed from botanical gardens and grew them here to test them out.\u201d<\/p> “A garden is not a painting, but a performance in time. I put plants on a stage and let them perform. You can\u2019t control the planting, just conduct it.”<\/p>Piet Oudolf<\/cite><\/blockquote> Eventually they dissolved their partnership and went their separate ways, but in those years Piet met and formed relationships with many of the greats of the British gardening scene, including Beth Chatto<\/a> and John Coke, who gave him his first big garden commission in the UK, at Bury Court in Surrey.<\/p> It was the 1990s, and his developing style, a driver of what we now call the Dutch Wave or New Perennials Movement, was about to take the gardening world by storm. However, using prairie-style<\/a> perennials and ornamental grasses<\/a> and leaving everything up over winter all seemed so contrary to the norm of annual bedding and mixed borders, cottage garden<\/a> plants and conifers. \u201cNobody understood how a nurseryman from the Netherlands could make a garden like this,\u201d he says. \u201cThey found it strange. But the British were the first people to appreciate my work, this new way to garden. You wouldn\u2019t think it, because traditional English gardening is so dogmatic, but the acceptance was quite quick.\u201d<\/p> His first book, Dream Plants for the Natural Garden<\/em>, with plantsman Henk Gerritsen, shared their ethos, and he has gone on to produce many more books with writer Noel Kingsbury. Since those early days, the New Perennials Movement has evolved into the drifts and swathes of the Naturalistic Planting style, but the central tenet of both \u2013 hard-working perennials that die well \u2013 has been instrumental in transforming countless gardens and public schemes around the world over the past 25 years.<\/p> Over the years, Piet has created ever more impressive projects, from early gardens at RHS Wisley (which he is now redesigning) and Scampston Hall to Trentham and Pensthorpe, as well as many private gardens, a Chelsea<\/a> show garden for Gardens Illustrated<\/em> which won Best in Show, and a Serpentine Pavilion installation. More recently, he designed plantings for the Olympic Park in London, and created the Oudolf Field at Hauser & Wirth<\/a> in Somerset, and has been involved in many parks across Europe and America, including the Lurie Garden in Chicago, a garden at Noma in Copenhagen and planting for the Vitra campus in Germany.<\/p> “People want more green now, and they accept more wildness, as long as it is still aesthetic. If planting is really wow, people won\u2019t throw their rubbish in it.”<\/p>Piet Oudolf<\/cite><\/blockquote> But his most famous work, and the one which propelled him to prominence outside of horticultural circles, is the planting of the High Line, a 1.5-mile-long park elevated along a disused railway line in New York. As he became widely known, the demand for his services grew. His wife Anja ran the nursery, leaving Piet free to make gardens. The number of visitors to Hummelo increased exponentially, and the couple made the decision to close the nursery and then their garden some years ago.<\/p> The old stock and trial beds may be gone, but the spaces around the buildings are still living experiments where Oudolf tries out plants, and in his studio \u2013 an imposing modern structure at one end of the garden \u2013 he continues to develop ideas, for gardens and parks as far flung as Korea and Detroit. The clean white room is sparsely but succinctly furnished, with a drafting table in one corner and computer in the other. On shelves around the room, hard hats rub up against vinyl figurines by street artists, and sun-bleached plant books sit alongside rows of classical music CDs. In the centre is a large table with various pots and containers of coloured markers, pencils and felt-tip pens, where Oudolf sketches out his planting plans, and can look out to the garden and surrounding farmland through floor-to-ceiling windows.<\/p> The designer says he doesn\u2019t have a philosophy, as such, but his aim is simply to share his passion with people by creating spaces that evoke pleasure. \u201cGood gardens take you away,\u201d he says. \u201cThey are very emotional.\u201d This response is something he seeks out and experiences himself regularly, in both accidental and curated landscapes. In the documentary Five Seasons<\/em>, of which Piet is the subject, we see him pulling over the car while on a road trip in America, captivated by the spring wildflowers on the verge. \u201cYou load yourself up with beauty, and you use it in your work,\u201d he says. Elsewhere in the film, he visits a prairie restoration project. \u201cI have been trying to recreate this feeling all my life,\u201d he says, rapt, in his own understated way, by what he sees.<\/p> Piet is not, however, trying to replicate these places in his work \u2013 only the reactions they provoke, by translating that magical atmosphere into human-scale spaces. \u201cWe don\u2019t create nature; we create gardens,\u201d he says. \u201cIt may look wild, but it shouldn\u2019t be wild. It has to be attractive to people \u2013 it is all about aesthetics.\u201d He is often called an artist, but though plants are his medium, Piet feels that \u201ca garden is not a painting, but a performance in time. I put plants on a stage and let them perform. You can\u2019t control the planting, just conduct it.\u201d<\/p>![\"Hauser](\"https:\/\/c02.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/40\/2023\/11\/JI_091415_PietOudolf_243-v2_preview-scaled.jpg\")
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