This process led to a large number of good and reliable selections, all well-known today in the world of plants for their specific character, beauty or use in gardens”. “From that moment onwards I began to choose plants that I thought might have potential either to create a new colour, or because they had better qualities – writes Oudolf –.

Here they created a nursery filled with thousands of perennial plants, testing their resistance and observing the changes in colour during the course of the seasons.

As Oudolf says “I try to create nature as you would wish to see it” – it’s a controlled, edited and maintained version of nature, which gives the impression of the wild.The landscape designer’s experience with plants began in 1982 when he moved to Hummelo, a small village in the west of The Netherlands, with his wife Anja. The big misconception about naturalistic meadow planting is that it is not a simple replica of nature that you can just abandon to do its thing, but a stylised and contrived rendering of it. Thanks to this, naturalistic gardens look good well beyond the traditional late-Spring -Autumn window, and in fact often look their best in the depths of winter.īut how to recreate it at home? Well the clue as it turns out, is not in the title. Swathes and large groupings of long-flowering perennials and grasses, naturalistic shapes and lines (no rectilinear symmetry here), an abundance of colour and variety of form and an appreciation for plants long past their flowering “best” are some of the hallmarks of this style of planting.

But it was Piet Oudolf who has transformed this yearning for the wild into a widely recognised style, one which has arguably been the defining characteristic of contemporary garden design over the last 20 years.

In defiance of an increasingly industrialised landscape, garden-making has steadily become more conscious of the vitality and importance of wilder and naturalistic landscapes as they disappear in an ever-more urban world. The Piet Oudolf field at Hauser & Wirth in Somerset is the much-photographed and universally adored example of a style of planting that has been gathering momentum since the Victorian era.

Piet oudolf