Known for having designed the planting of New York's High Line park, landscape designer Piet Oudolf is considered the father of naturalistic gardens. He is now also involved in the creation of the Biblioteca degli alberi in Milan.
He is the most celebrated landscape designer — landscape designer in English — at the international level, acclaimed by ecologists for his contribution to the theme of biodiversity. Piet Oudolf, Dutch, born in 1944, designs gardens like an artist, with a predominance of grasses and herbaceous perennials inspired by the way plants associate freely in nature, with chromatic variations as beautiful as paintings in every season.
His experience with plants began in 1982, when he moved with his wife Anja to Hummelo, a small village in the eastern Netherlands. There the couple created a true "nursery" — an English word meaning a place where young plants are grown — to cultivate thousands of perennials, test their resilience and observe their chromatic and aesthetic changes over the course of the seasons.
"From that moment on I began making selections of plants that I thought might have potential; either to create a new colour or because they possessed better qualities," writes Oudolf. "This process led to a great number of good and reliable selections, all now well known in the plant world for their specific character, their beauty or their use in gardens."
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Oudolf has radically redefined what gardens and public green spaces can be, with naturalness and spontaneity, without fixed schemes and distancing himself from the aesthetics of ornamental plants and from the models of the constructed garden. "A successful garden is a subtle balance of form and movement. It must look natural and spontaneous, but never out of control."
The recent documentary Five seasons by director Thomas Piper, presented at the Milano design film festival in October, immerses viewers in Oudolf's work and his creative process — from fascinating abstract drawings to theories on beauty to the ecological implications of his ideas. The film also follows Oudolf as he designs and installs a major new garden at Hauser & Wirth Somerset, a gallery and arts centre in south-west England, a green space he considers his masterpiece.
"For me, garden design is not only about plants, but about emotion, atmosphere, the sense of contemplation. I try to give people something more with what I do, something that goes deeper than what you see," says Oudolf.
Oudolf finds artistic inspiration everywhere — in nature and in art history, from the wildflowers of the desert in west Texas and post-industrial forests in Pennsylvania, to the works of painters such as Claude Monet, who imagined and depicted gardens. The expressive freedom and seasonal transformations of the garden at the Hummelo house, where he continues to live with his wife, are, for example, a work of pure poetry.
In the 1980s Oudolf founded Future Plants, a company specialising in the selection, cultivation, propagation and protection of plants endowed with all the qualities needed for beautification and suited to use in public green spaces. "Plants for public green spaces must be beautiful and attractive. When those plants also attract insects, butterflies and birds, then they are truly ideal plants," the landscape designer explains.
The designer of the planting at New York's High Line and Battery Park, Oudolf has dozens of parks and gardens to his name around the world: from the Lurie Garden in Chicago's Millennium Park to the botanical garden in Toronto, from the Serpentine pavilion by Peter Zumthor in London to the Garden of the Virgins at the 12th Venice Biennale.
Oudolf is currently a consultant on the Biblioteca degli alberi project in Milan, designed by Petra Blaisse's Amsterdam studio Inside Outside, which will be the third-largest public park in the city centre. Linear paths, circular forests and irregular meadows are the three sections of the park project, due to be completed in 2018. This last section is entrusted to Oudolf: it will be a naturalistic garden with an abundance of ornamental grasses.
Read also: Una biblioteca degli alberi per Milano
At the Fondazione Riccardo Catella in Milan, at via Gaetano De Castillia 18, until 31 January 2018 visitors can see Biblioteca degli alberi. A park experience, a 12-minute video installation that tells, through an immersive and emotional experience, the story of the Biblioteca degli alberi project and the guiding themes that inspired it. Images, footage, words and sounds invite visitors to reflect on the close connections between nature, culture, the city and the new public parks that represent true biodiversity oases capable of improving the microclimate and quality of life in urban areas.