Oudolf

I’m not sure if Piet Oudolfs’ work should be described as Garden or Landscape or Meadow or Prairie or Field or maybe they are simply all of these things. However the work is described, Oudolf has somehow managed to walk all of these descriptions seemingly with ease. Oudolfs’ designs celebrate the beautiful order and chaos of nature, using the humble plant as the core weapon in his armoury of landscape design.

Piet Oudolf

Starting out with his wife, Anja Libbenga, Piet Oudolf trained whilst starting a plant nursery with hard to find plants and particularly perennials in 1982, in Hummelo (the Netherlands).

Landscape of seasons.

This period of running a nursery enabled a deep understanding of plants, their life-cycle and particularly test those plants robust enough to survive cold European winters and hot summers. I say ‘life-cycle’ because Oudolf designs are a celebration of the whole of the plants’ life with equal value placed on the bloom and its ultimate decay. Decay offers Oudolf the opportunity to celebrate the sculptural quality of the plant, as it nears its end. 

Piet Oudolf on Vitra Campus.

Oudolf designs map the characteristics of plants, utilising form, scale, texture and colour, managing to create spaces that are seemingly natural and yet thoughtfully curated. Certainly Oudolf has taken advantage of a period of design in which opulence and the ostentatious is less fashionable and nature and modesty celebrated. Oudolf’s work seems familiar, like something from another time.

Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, London with architect Peter Zumthor and Piet Oudolf, 2011.

Bridging both the constructed environment and nature, New York’s High Line is probably his most well know commission (along with collaborators, project lead Diller Scofidio and Renfro) in which he transforms a disused rail line into a pedestrian thoroughfare for the people of Manhattan. Once again, he uses plants to stand proud and be comfortably placed alongside the industrial train line; contrast on show.

High Line, New York, started 2009.

Piet Oudolf balances a technical ability to use a variety of flowers, shrubs, grasses and trees to evoke an untouched landscape which in turn echoes a nostalgic connection to a time where nature was left to do its thing and there wasn’t a desire to put our ‘stamp on things’. Oudolf skill is his balance of modesty and restraint with heroic gestures. 

S.W