Oudolf designed the green spaces of The High Line and Battery Park in New York, in addition to dozens of others around the world: from the Lurie Garden in Chicago‘s Millenium Park and Toronto‘s botanical garden, to the landscaping of Peter Zumthor’s Serpentine Pavilion in London and the “Giardino delle vergini” at the 12th Venice Architecture Biennale. When that plant also attracts insects, butterflies and birds, it’s a truly ideal plant,” he explains. “Plants for landscaping and public green should be beautiful and attractive, not troublesome and must be reliable. In the 1980s Oudolf founded Future Plants, a company specialised in the selection, cultivation, reproduction and protection of plants with all the necessary qualities to embellish and make them suitable for use in public green spaces. The film also follows Oudolf as he designs and installs a new garden for Hauser & Wirth Somerset, a gallery and arts centre in southwest England, which he considers his masterpiece. From fascinating abstract drawings to theories about beauty and the ecological implication of his ideas. It should seem natural and spontaneous, but never out of control”.įive Seasons, a documentary by Thomas Piper that premiered in October 2017 at the Milano Design Film Festival, immerses spectators in Oudolf’s work and creative process. “A successful garden is a subtle balance between form and movement. Oudolf has radically redefined what gardens and public green spaces can be: natural and spontaneous, without fixed schemes and distant from the aesthetics of ornamental plants and traditional models. This process led to a large number of good and reliable selections, all well-known today in the world of plants for their specific character, beauty or use in gardens”. “From that moment onwards I began to choose plants that I thought might have potential either to create a new colour, or because they had better qualities – writes Oudolf –. Here they created a nursery filled with thousands of perennial plants, testing their resistance and observing the changes in colour during the course of the seasons. The landscape designer’s experience with plants began in 1982 when he moved to Hummelo, a small village in the west of The Netherlands, with his wife Anja.

Piet oudolf