Piet Oudolf on design and plants

Having discovered the joys of gardening while selling Christmas trees at a garden centre, Piet Oudolf has become one of the most influential plantsmen and garden designers of our time. In this episode of Design Emergency, he tells our cofounder, Alice Rawsthorn, how his years of research into plants and their behaviour and love of wild gardens have revived obscure species and transformed our expectations of gardens and landscapes.

Piet spoke to Alice from Hummelo in the eastern Netherlands where he lives, works and, together with his wife Anja, has established a living laboratory of plants to study for use in his designs, including those for Chicago’s Millennium Park; Belle Isle in Detroit; and his most famous project, the High Line, the public garden on a disused elevated railroad in Manhattan which is visited by millions of people every year and has inspired scores of similar projects worldwide.

The great garden designers of the past were renowned for creating visual spectacles and designed their planting schemes accordingly. But Piet is a leader of the New Perennial movement whose designs are determined by how plants evolve and respond to one another, often using wildflowers, grasses, long forgotten local species and those dismissed as weeds in naturalistic planting schemes that are designed to last year after year.

Thank you for joining us for Alice’s interview with the great Piet Oudolf. You’ll find images of the gardens he describes on our Instagram grid @design.emergency. And you can tune into this episode of Design Emergency and others on Apple, Spotify, Amazon and other podcast platforms. Please join us for future episodes when we will interview other global design leaders who, like Piet, are at the forefront of forging positive change.

Design Emergency is supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

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