If the world of gardening has rock stars, Piet Oudolf qualifies as Mick Jagger, David Bowie, and Prince rolled into one. The Dutch panorama designer—whose work is immediately recognizable for its dreamy romanticism and oft-copied for its emphasis on sustainable, wise plantings—makes it look really easy. However is it?
We’ve dog-eared Oudolf’s books. Hummelo and Planting: A New Perspective are our two gardening bibles (and we quote from each beneath). Studying them, you study that signature Oudolf model requires drifts of grasses, completely acceptable perennials, and backyard beds that look lovely even within the depths of winter. Listed below are 10 of Piet Oudolf’s greatest concepts to steal to your personal backyard.
Pictures through Hummelo, courtesy of The Monacelli Press.
Make a four-season backyard.
Flowers fade. Oudolf chooses crops extra for form and texture than for his or her blooms. Stripped naked, stalks, stems, and seed pods grow to be architectural components within the backyard. The key: Embrace decay as a substitute of speeding into the backyard together with your pruners on the first signal of wilting.
To create a four-season backyard, begin by planting perennials and grasses that thrive in your USDA Plant Hardiness Zone (when you don’t know your zone, enter your zip code right here.) The hardier the plant, the higher it would face up to adjustments in climate. (Keep away from perennials “that collapse into mush with the primary onerous frost,” says Oudolf.)
After flowers wither, go away the crops in place as a substitute of reducing them again. Sturdy stalks and dried seed pods will stand as much as frost and snow, coated in white, will tackle an ethereal otherworldliness.
For the same look: Select perennials and grasses that develop to a top of two to 3 ft, so their stalks and stems will stick out of the snow in a particular means. By late winter, when stalks break off or begin to look scraggly, unhappy, or deflated, in the reduction of all the things to the bottom.
Plant in hazy swaths.
