New Perennialist Planting

It’s called a movement sometimes, this apparently loose-defined international way of thinking about plants. It’s “planting,” rather than “gardening.” It emphasises simple, minimal maintenance needs, variety, and an unstructured appearance a point in our history one author calls “post-wild”. It employs considerable effort to look as effortless as possible.

The name that crops up repeatedly in the discussion is Piet Oudolf, a quiet Dutchman with a glorious list of prominent garden designs to his credit, among them the Lurie Garden in Chicago, and Battery Park and the High Line in New York. His own garden, at Hummelo in the Netherlands, seem to function a bit like a pilgrimage site for enthusistic New Perennialists. 

Oudolf is a quiet, deliberate man, who speaks very simply, but commands a vast knowledge of plants, a fine sensitivity to environments and splendid memory for them. He seems to really want people to understand how he arrives at his decisions and does his very best to make it clear. Only in fact it isn’t simple. He definitely makes decisions related to the light, water, and the ways people will see the site, but he’s also constantly making aesthetic decisions. Those are necessarily his own. In some sense, to “follow” Oudolf would be to build up one’s own knowledge of and relationships to plants to the point of being able to make one’s own aesthetic decisions, because any one of us, given a particular time, place and site, would plant in a unique way. 

The image is, surprisingly, out of copyright, a segment of Piet Oudolf’s planting design for Hauser & Wirth Somerset garden.