The Master of the Spontaneous Garden
"You're treating death and destruction from the point of view of life".
One wouldn't usually expect to find garden designers gracing the covers of magazines or trendy blogs, but then garden designers don't usually have the type of fan base found with Piet Oudolf. He's achieved the unlikely feat of bringing landscape design to millions, and even he's not certain where his sudden success has sprung from. New York's High Line, the Millennium Park in Chicago and the Serpentine Gallery's pavilion are amongst his best known creations attracting masses of visitors.  Peter Veenstra, one of the head designers of Lola Landscape Architects is participating in a landscape design competition with Piet. A young landscape designer's desire to ask Piet about his work, together with my curiosity about Piet's taste and concepts is what lead the questions of this interview - held in Piet and Anja’s beautiful private gardens on the outskirts of the small Dutch town of Hummelo. He shared his history with us alongside some of his expectations for the future. Rohmer
22
Plant Journal
23
Rachel Sender How did you end up in Hum-
commercially, although now I’m just a partner and it is run by other people. Anyway, seventy isn’t such a big amount, and although many are still in the trade some are already lost. Is it really important?
melo?
Piet Oudolf
It was 1982, and it was a question of money. We needed plenty of hectares for our nurseries and couldn’t afford a piece of land as big as this one in Amsterdam. We were living in Haarlem, on the outskirts, with little space, and we found this place which was economic and it was in the neighborhood of three big cities like Zutphen, Arnhem and Doetichem. We thought this could be a place we could survive and find clients. That is how it started. We found the evicted farmhouse and we started with the small nursery; working hard.
PV I think it’s interesting. It sounds like innovation on the most elementary level of design... PO Designing is my work but plant breeding is my hobby. What I do is innovation of colors, of the character of plants. I started finding some plants that look better than the original one we had, with longer living f lowers, for example. It is about observation and experimentation, selecting plants, seeding and planting them out. That’s how we did it, just working on the side. It is a very nice work, very interesting. There's something very special about working with plants: you can divide them and split them or make cuttings... If you only do that and you’re not interrupted by people or by design work; it’s very relaxing and very satisfying. PV You've worked on the Serpentine Gallery, it could be considered perfect surroundings for plant design. It’s fantastic, isolated, almost sacral. The High Line in New York is also an example of a very special context. How do you depend on spatial context?
RS When did your interest in plants begin? PO It was in the 70's. My parents had a pub and a restaurant but I thought I wasn’t going to do that for the rest of my life. So I went back to school for four years. I got the basic ideas and I became a landscape contractor on paper. I started my garden design office and after five years, in 1982, I thought I could grow. I just wanted to have more plants around me, more space, so we started to look for a farmhouse where we could grow our own plants. I was very small-scale thinking because I was working on small gardens. But the aim was to have a nursery to provide the plants, collect more and more and create a trial garden. It was hard. It took us another ten years to get established and have a nice little business again.
PO All design depends more or less on the context; it is always there. I like to work on landscapes that are human size, but the appropriate context for me is the city. The social aspect of my work is also very important for me, so the fact that millions of people find out that there is a garden and can go there and enjoy it is better than working on a private garden. Everyone wants to reach out with their work. There is a sort of communication between you and the public, and that’s what all artists do.
Peter Veenstra You have also bred seventy
RS How do you feel now that everybody knows
plants with your wife Anja, right? PO We named over seventy new species, yes. Breeding is just growing plants, but what we do goes further. We even started a company: Future Plants. We grew plants and brought them up more
Piet Oudolf inter view
about your work?
PO In gardening most people already knew
about me, but in architecture more and more people are getting to know me nowadays. It feels
24
Plant Journal
PO
good, but it doesn’t change me at all. I was busy ten years ago and twenty years ago. Maybe with a little more stress, maybe doing different things, but I have done so many things in my life! If you are well known it’s probably because you had a certain attitude. I always had to work hard to get where we are now so when things really happen in other people’s eyes, nothing really changes. You are suddenly there for certain people, they “discover you” but other people already knew me, maybe just from another source. In the end nothing changes; only the work changes.
PV
right?
Well, I can do more than I do by myself, I try to be busy with the more conceptual side of landscape and garden design. I like to cooperate with other people like Jelle Bennema from Delta Vorm Groep and Kathryn Gustafson, who collaborated with me in the Chicago Millennium Park. I need people that I can communicate with, to work out ideas and think about them.
PV Does the Millennium Park in Chicago mark a difference in your work? PO My work has become more conceptual.
It’s not the amount of work that changes,
Piet Oudolf inter view
Well, sort of mix. I am always going back and
25
Plant Journal
27
if you use the same plants - it looks different all the time. Because you always want to go a step further or break boundaries, always trying to go beyond your capabilities and break rules. As a good designer you always want to go further, and I have that as a path.
forward between the traditional way of grouping plants together - there’s a variety next to another variety, next to another; it is sort of a sequence, a repetition in aesthetic harmony. Nowadays I work more on the idea, a big one or a little one, the moods, or the dynamics, or how people experience my design. There might be only five or six different plants or the opposite: 40 to 50 varieties, but they carry the whole garden through all the seasons. It is just one picture; there is not too much happening or complex, but it stands on its own. My work has also become more naturalistic through the years, although it has never lost the quality of design. Ecology becomes more and more part of it, but since ecology itself doesn’t mean beauty; you have to design.
RS
Do you design in a way that requires a low level of maintenance?
PO
Ecology makes it easier because you have to interfere less; it is about evolving maintenance. You also come to a point where things and plants get a little bit more freedom. That happens if you work with plants that grow well together, don’t cheat too much and stay put. And you cover the ground, which is very important. Then you'll need less maintenance than in traditional planting. A lot of the plants that I use are long lived whereas in the traditional gardening a lot of annuals and bi-annuals are involved that will die after a year and need to be replanted. Even worse, most traditional gardens are based on decoration, to look good for a particular moment in the year, and after that it doesn’t really matter. If it looks bad they put something else in between, a few pots, and then it looks good for the rest of the year... But with my way of working on public projects you can’t do that. It has to look good from the beginning until the end.
RS You find inspiration in nature. How would you difference a scene in nature from one of your designs?
The fire escape is ‘the’ New York garden, and the one that, until now, we can also be whatever PO I try to touch people in a way that reminds
them of something they think they know from nature. That works, you know? It is psychological; it doesn't have anything to do with nature. Automatically it has that connection with nature but it is completely directed, conducted. It is designed. You can never say it is nature because nature is freedom, the strongest survives. And neither is ecology; ecology is the result of all that happens by interference, how plants grow well together and also our influence. My work is where ecology meets design or better said, where design meets ecology.
RS
Does it ever happen? Because you work a lot with a touch of randomness, like you weren’t really fully controlling the reactions of the plants.
PO It looks random but it’s not. I like things to be more spontaneous: allowing plants to go a little bit further or a few siblings here and there. But mostly, the more random it looks the more qualified the gardener should be. If you organize the garden in a more classical way, the easier it will be for the gardener to understand. So when you go into a naturalistic kind of planting, where you are on the borderline between control and non-control, then you need someone who knows really well about the picture you have in mind as a designer. It requires a qualified gardener to take care of it.
RS How do you get to that point? PO I guess I am more interested in plants and
the ways of using them than a general landscape designer or architect, who are mostly focused on hard surface. If you are creative: you evolve and your work evolves. It is never static so even
Piet Oudolf inter view
28
Plant Journal
Rohmer
29
Plant Journal
etons and seed heads. Some flowering plants have the ability to go dressed through all the seasons.
PV It seems that nowadays plants are turning into a new trend for a lot of people. If you look at the 70's there was also a wave of ecological awareness and it kind of went away. PO Because the plants were too wild. I know for sure. They wanted to have nature in the garden, but nature is too cruel and too big. Everything has to be in scale, you can't put nature in a garden like that; it’s not beautiful. You can only get people into something when it has some visual qualities, so you have to work in a naturalistic way but also aesthetic. If you lose aesthetics there's no respect. That is why a lot of landscape architects go wrong. Even on the High Line, they just wanted to reproduce nature exactly as it is. And that's not possible because you get all the plants you don't want, everything goes wild and you can't control it. It should be controllable and all the process should be slow so you can take action when something happens.
RS
Your gardens are seasonal. How do you think the public reacts when they see the winter side of your garden, with dead plants and flowers?
PV
If you look at garden history, very few gardens are preserved. Does this worry you?
PO Times have changed. I don’t hear people
PO Not at all. Maybe in ten years no one will like these gardens anymore; they could become old-fashioned. It’s a cultural thing, and has it’s own context in time. If it is a building you can preserve it; but a garden is something dynamic, very ephemeral. You can always recreate it from a sketch if you still like it.
complaining anymore. That was part of the traditional gardening, which was very dogmatic with all its rules: in a certain time of the year you have to do this, fourteen days later you have to do your roses, then take the dead flowers out… When you garden more with your eyes, for pleasure, you can forget most these rules and ask yourself: Is this really necessary? Do I need to take the dead flowers out? Do I need to cut it back? Do I want more flowers if I cut it back? It is more about how it appeals to you. Some people are not used to it but actually it is all about the image. If the dead flowers work well together with the plants, no one will complain. But traditionally there won't be a garden like this. They are more about the flowers, the colors and the highlights of the season. In May, June and July, the months of the roses, the garden is all bloomed, but it becomes decay in autumn. I emphasize from the beginning to use plants that flower later because they often have better skel-
Piet Oudolf inter view
PV
Don't you even want to write a maintenance book or something to instruct how to take care of the gardens you’ve designed?
PO Not really. My gardens are like a performance in time, so I suppose they will disappear. I rather like if they live in people’s minds because they are always nicer in your fantasy than in reality. There is enough documentation and people who have read and written about what I do. For me that is very nice and much better for the future because it gives you a place in time with30
Plant Journal
and that’s nice. You can’t plan it, you can’t think of what will be better than so and so. If you have done a few very good things then you tend to think you can’t do anything better. I did the project in Chicago and then thought, “What can I do that surpasses this place?” And the High Line came. And then I thought again, “What can I do greater than this?” But then something greater happens.
out a sort of discussion afterwards. Instead of just keeping the gardens and saying: “this is what he did” people will know the context of time when you were working, which is much more important to like it.
PV
Is there any specific work that you would like to do in the future?
PO I have to pick my work now, and I work on
public spaces because it is more satisfying. But I have no idea what I will do. The New York High Line or the Venice Architectural Bienniale, I did not expect that, for instance. And they have asked me for the second time this year. Then the Serpentine with Peter Zumthor came. If you had asked me, what do you want? I would have never guessed it would have been what I did these past couple of years. Things come. Sometimes you want to do something and another project comes your way which is even better than the one you had imagined. Now the Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo has asked me for my sketches for an exhibition. I have always thrown them away, three years ago they were just sketches and now they want to exhibit them! So you never know,
Piet Oudolf inter view
31
Plant Journal