Easy Does It
All the Dutch, type-A style effort, planning, and pining that goes into a breezy, wild-looking flower garden.
A friend who lives on one of the San Juan Islands in Washington recently posted a photo of her ferry ride to the mainland with the text, “If it was easy, everyone would do it.” I’ve come to believe that in this world, there are things that are easy, and things that look easy, and there are much, much more of the latter than the former.
For a long time now, I have loved a particular garden aesthetic that looks like it was always already there. I put up a lot of these on Pinterest; I love gawking at people’s naturalistic gardens, a particular favorite being Martina Thornhill’s; I am often fed content that looks like this:
You’ll notice, a lot of times these images also come along with phrasing or hashtags that talk about #rewilding. It gives the impression that humans should get out of the goddamn way and let nature do its thing. Most of the time, I tend to agree, but, almost inevitably, these spaces are meticulously planned perennial gardens that have been specifically planted to look this way. I can speak with experience that when you do get out of the way, especially if you intend to rewild an existing garden bed (as opposed, you know, to leaving something that was already there), it will become an inevitable tangle of unwanted weeds and they will not be particularly pretty. Have you ever searched “how to create a wildflower meadow”? I have and it’s so much more laborious than those beautiful, smug lil meadows would have you believe.
Why do we do this to ourselves?
Apparently, primarily on the force of Dutch garden superstar, Piet Oudolf. He, along with his oft-cowriter and peer Henk Gerritsen, are largely responsible for what is sometimes called the New Perennial movement (or Dutch Wave or New Wave Planting). Oudolf has created many gardens that exemplify this style—one that readers of this particular outfit might recognize is the High Line in New York.
In his 20s, Oudolf got a job at a nursery and immediately fell in love with plants, attending night school to receive his degree in landscape design and contracting. Of the style of the time (and honestly, sort of now too), he said, “It was dogmatic—deadheading, staking. I got a bit tired of that.” So, he started to work with ornamental prairie grasses (many native species from the US), incorporating those with perennial plants and just letting them be. Eventually, he was able to open his firm in Haarlem, The Netherlands, where he started building acclaim for his unconventional designs.
In the early 1980s, Piet, his wife Anja and their two children, moved to Hummelo, a small Dutch town on the boarder of Germany, where they started to host their now notorious Garden Days. These gatherings—which attracted other early figures in this movement, philosopher Rob Leopold and painter/planter Ton der Linden—were incubators for new ideas about planting, art, ecology, and horticulture. The property itself became a laboratory for Piet to explore these ideas and hybridize new species for his designs. The gatherings ended in 1991 and the nursery has since been put to bed, but this style of gardening and the theories attached to it are pervasive and, to my mind, really show no signs of stopping.
So, what exactly are some of the tenants and techniques of this style?
Plants are selected not only for their peak bloom-moment, but moreso for the way they look while in decay and, especially, once dead. These gardens do not get cut back in the fall (some do not get cut back at all), so selecting grass species that have a beautiful color in the winter, or flowers with interesting seed pods is a cornerstone of (if not kind of ~the whole thing with~) this aesthetic. I love this Oudolf quote from a 2008 New York Times profile: “When it freezes it looks even better.”
Plants are put in close together to create that meadow look and to keep unwanted weeds at bay.
Grasses and herbaceous plants are big here.
Perennials, really exclusively. We aren’t in the business of dealing with annuals and seeds—we’re putting something in that will grow, develop, and root down in a particular location.
An example of a New Perennial garden in winter!
You may be wondering what happened to the bullet point on ecology. It’s not here. Oudolf gets compared to being a painter quite a bit and the New Perennial movement is squarely an aesthetic one.1 In the introduction to Oudolf’s book “At Work,” German landscape designer Cassian Schmidt writes, “Piet’s plantings, while strongly inspired by natural landscape models, are at the same time enhanced, scenically arranged and abstracted versions of nature.” And in the documentary on his work, Five Seasons, Oudolf says of one design, “A little surrealistic, not a real meadow, but something that reminds you very strongly of it. These plants you would never find in a meadow.”
That said, the overall New Perennial look, in my humblest option, is utterly rife for native plant or pollinator gardens—and gardens that prioritize those two objectives tend to resemble this look anyway. My own former garden in Los Angeles was like this (not Piet-level, but, you know, nice) and was comprised near-exclusively of native plants from one of my favorite places ever, Theodore Payne Foundation. (Natives, plus an olive tree and one feral rosemary.)
And, since we’re in the business of making pretend meadows, I personally think we might as well include some plants for the bees and butterflies, right? Throw ‘em a bone, as it were. Which brings us back to where we started—a pretty neat thing if we’re talking year-round garden planting—rewilding. While Instagram may want you (and me; me so much of the time) to think these spaces just sort of happened, with some careful selections and planning and weed-busting, we can create naturalistic spaces à la Oudolf that also do the thing they look like they’re doing. Just like one of my favorite Whole Earth Catalog catchphrases and a little counterpoint to my Island friend: “Difficult, but possible.”
Further reading/watching:
The New Perennialist
Henk Gerritsen: His Life and Vision
Ton de Linden’s website
Trailer for Five Seasons, documentary on Oudolf
Tiny boat > tiny house. (LINK)
BLUE SINK (LINK)
Another house boat, but like, not in the same way. (LINK)
This is not a house boat, or even a boat-shaped house, but my, it’s stunning. (LINK)
I know, I know, the High Line is all native plants, but, you just ~generally~ catch my drift, eh? For Piet, natives and pollinators aren’t the whole point, but they’re definitely around and, hey, they can still be our whole point, right?