“Nobody understood how a nurseryman from the Netherlands could make a garden like this,” he says. But using prairie-style perennials and ornamental grasses? Leaving everything up over winter? It all seemed so contrary to the norm of annual bedding and mixed borders, cottage garden plants and conifers. It was the 1990s, and his developing style, which was a driver of what we now call the Dutch Wave or New Perennials Movement, was on the cusp of taking the garden world by storm.
Oudolf’s hand-drawn and coloured plan for his schemes at the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park We also collected seed from botanical gardens and grew them here to test them out.” Eventually they dissolved their partnership and went their separate ways, but in those years Oudolf met and formed relationships with many of the movers and shakers of the British gardening scene, including Beth Chatto and John Coke, who gave him his first big garden commission in the UK, at Bury Court in Surrey. “Everywhere we went, we found new plants. “In the beginning, it was an adventure,” Oudolf says. Designing gardens took a backseat as the pair looked for interesting plants to grow. It was here that he started his nursery in 1982 with horticulturist Romke van de Kaa, who had worked at RHS Wisley and also Great Dixter under Christopher Lloyd. He draws his planting plans by hand in his studio
“That was how we found this place, a derelict farmhouse,” he says, describing his home in Hummelo. So I went back to school in the evening for four years, and studied to get qualifications so I could start my own business building gardens.” After several years as a contractor, and frustrated at not being able to source the plants he wanted for his projects, Oudolf looked for a place where he could grow them himself.
It was there that he became interested in gardening, and began to buy plants. He was in his twenties, working in his parents’ restaurant, and unhappy, when he decided to find a different career, and tried out various jobs in a fishery, a steel factory and a garden centre. Unlike other gardening celebrities, however, he didn’t discover his passion for plants as a child. Now in his early seventies, and the winner of the SGD Lifetime Achievement Award 2019, Piet Oudolf is the closest thing there is to a horticultural superstar. The Dutch plantsman’s groundbreaking designs have won him worldwide acclaim
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