On a quiet Saturday morning, I watch as a bee dances from bulb to bulb of southern globethistle (Echinops ritro), replaced by another member of its hive the moment it leaps to another plant. There’s something entrancing about their movements, as if the buzzy pollinators are astronauts hopping from planet to planet in a tiny solar system.
And all around me, there’s the buzz of the nearly 40 volunteers who gather here every Saturday morning, shears and shovels in hand, to perform maintenance on the Vlinderhof in Máximapark, Utrecht, one of eight gardens in the Netherlands designed by Piet Oudolf. Oudolf is a leading figure of the “New Perennial Movement,” a landscape design philosophy dating back to the 1970s, centered around the idea that a design should remain interesting all year, an effect achieved by incorporating wild grasses and plants that will leave behind seed heads and skeletons.
Take those globethistles, for instance, which in four months’ time will have shed their brilliant indigo sheen and left their spherical seed heads behind, an invaluable source of food for birds, and for humans, a reminder that life is still stirring even in the dead of winter.
“Through this method of design, we opened people’s eyes to other aspects of plants beyond flowers,” Oudolf told The New York Times in a 2021 interview. “There’s beauty in a seed head in winter, and in the bird feeding on that seed head.”
Oudolf’s gardens combine groups of perennial plants with tall grasses evoking the Dutch countryside. Abundant variety is common in his designs: Utrecht’s Vlinderhof contains about 100 different plant species in total (it’s worth taking some time to page through his pastel-drawn design sketches, works of art in their own right). His gardens are dotted throughout the globe: see New York’s High Line and Battery Gardens, (the largest public-access perennial garden in North America), Japan’s Tokyo Garden, and Italy’s Biennale Venice. Closest to Madison is Chicago’s Lurie Garden, a two and a half acre garden in the south end of Millennium Park.
But even if you can’t visit an Oudolf garden, you can probably find his influence somewhere in your neighborhood. If you’re in Dane County, just head over to Allen Centennial Gardens in Madison, whose “New American Garden” section was inspired by Oudolf and other New Perennial practitioners, as former Allen Centennial Gardens executive director Ben Futa remarked in 2018. For Futa, Oudolf's writing on texture changed how he thinks about garden design entirely.
“I remember reading a passage in one of Piet’s books that said if you take an image of a garden and de-saturate it of all color, and if you can still pick out one plant from another, you have been successful at establishing a strong textural relationship,” Futa said in a 2017 interview with A Way To Garden. “Ever since then, I have started to think about texture almost more powerfully than I think about color, because texture is with you for longer, again, nine times out of ten, [a flower] bloom is with you for just that one blip of time.”
Textural variance, as Futa notes, is a key tenet of New Perennialism, achieved by pairing grasses and shrubs with forbs within a planting. Think grass stalks shooting up from otherwise level, staid flower beds. Additionally, this mixing of plant types naturally increases a garden's biodiversity, which goes a long way toward improving its ecological impact. Taking that principle further, using plants native to your region lets you create a garden that's both beautiful and a sustainable habitat for wildlife. Native perennials also offer an additional host of benefits: they reduce erosion, enable carbon capture. Many also serve as host plants, providing food or shelter that insects need to reproduce, or supply food, nesting materials, and shelter for birds and other animals.
Oudolf’s philosophies should be an inspiration for gardeners everywhere. He’s a master of layering textures and colors throughout a planting, honoring the beauty and spontaneity that is found in nature. Wisconsin’s urban landscapes are often dominated by lawn and other drab designs, the same boxwoods, hydrangeas, and hostas planted in straight, unnatural crop-like rows. Oudolf offers us an alternative, showing us how beautiful a naturalistic garden can be.