Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/380083
Oudolf's style has moved on radically, but he remains quick to give credit to early friends and colleagues such as Ernst Pagels and Henk Gerritsen. He cites Rob Leopold as a great influence: "Our philosophy was to get rid of the dogmas, of the dictatorship of traditional horticulture," he says. "This ongoing discussion was sort of a repeating circle, going one stage deeper every time… or, one should probably say, higher, until it touched heaven." These heavenly intentions have been brought gloriously down to earth in Oudolf's private and public commissions that can now be seen across the globe, from the Lurie Garden in Chicago to Scampston Hall or Bury Court in England and a raft of exquisite small gardens throughout Europe. "I am not bothered about the size of the project, but I do have to have an instinctive relationship with the client or architect I am working with," says Oudolf. "That dialogue and understanding trigger my creativity. The process of the work I do revolves around these relationships." His collaboration with Peter Zumthor for the Serpentine Pavilion in London, his masterful transformation of New York's High Line and his most recent work for Hauser & Wirth are cases in point. The latter is being celebrated in "Piet Oudolf: Open Field"—a show of Oudolf's artistic, blueprint drawings on paper, redolent of Matisse cut-outs—currently on view at Hauser & Wirth Somerset. The High Line is an ongoing artwork that proves Oudolf is not just a perennials man. He has teased sections of woodland out of soil only two feet deep, and his planting evokes an ebb and flow of habitats as diverse as prairie or copse, each one changing with the seasons but continuously ornamental and life-enhancing. Oudolf has had a profound visual influence on a generation of landscape designers, architects, planners and developers, as his bravura metropolitan projects have brought up the fundamental importance of the power of planting in urban regeneration. "Dream Plants for the Natural Garden" has reached textbook status for any student of landscape design and spawned a generation of copyists. However, nobody achieves the sinuous and multilayered depth of a perennial planting scheme quite like Oudolf. 140 CULTURED The Dutchman formally trained as an architect, but nature lured him into a career devoted to the definition and manipulation of space. The Royal Horticultural Society's garden in Surrey, England, was designed in 2001.