The Art of Piet Oudolf

In childhood, my bedroom was simply a glorious mess. At age 12, I started to clean up and decorate. And because I had a thing for grasses, the first thing I stuck in a vase was a composition of grasses and large canna leaves. All these years later, I can still remember that intense pleasure of creating something and staring at it for hours till it was no longer novel or immensely beautiful to my eye.

I still love grasses. Every train ride in Sydney affords a momentary stab of pleasure for train yards seem particularly good hosts. Grasses are marginal creatures - growing in derelict spaces in masses, their heads ethereally beautiful white clouds or wispy pink strands.

Piet Oudolf is something of a founding father of the New Perennial or New Wave Planting movement. Native grasses and flowering perennials are more often than not massed to form compositions of drifts, especially in city spaces. They bring colour to urban landscapes but more importantly, the grasses (as can be seen in the pictures above) bring a sense of the natural world to the city that formal floral displays do not. The pictures do not capture it but grasses are particularly susceptible to wind and light (as the NYT article on Mr. Oudolf points out he pays particular attention to these elements) so that motion is integrated with the visual spectacle of the garden. This is why we are always moved by, for example, wheat fields. As the article makes clear, Mr. Oudolf is also interested in the poetry of decay, in the form of things in the winter of their life.

Unfortunately, few of Mr. Oudolf's books are available here though Kinokuniya does stock a few. The text in the books is not fully illustrative of the philosophy behind the gardens, Mr. Oudolf's site itself is a fairly good resource.

NYT article on Mr. Oudolf here. Pictures in the NYT also reproduced here.

For an Australian garden that is decidedly the art of not gardening, see here.