There’s no time like the present to talk about the future.
That’s the premise for the next edition of The New Perennialist Talks with very special guest writer Nöel Kingsbury. Our goal is to consider the future of naturalistic garden design and where it might go next.
This feels like a singular opportunity to put out our collective antennae and Nöel is superbly qualified to lead off this discussion.
This just in.
I interrupt my previously-scheduled blogpost to share the superlative news that Piet Oudolf and Dr. Noel Kingsbury are teaming up to present a new online global course with MyGardenSchool.
How far will a keen perennial gardener go in the search for new ideas?
Lately, it’s far beyond my own garden gate, and recently involved plane, train and taxi rides all the way to the tiny village of Hummelo in the eastern Netherlands.
I arrived there early one morning last July to be welcomed by none other than Piet Oudolf, the silver-maned Dutch lion of modern landscape design, standing outside his rust-coloured brick farmhouse.
Thrilled to be there and yet not knowing quite what to expect, I was one of a diverse group of 25 landscape designers and avid gardeners from as far away as New Zealand, Argentina, Sweden, the U.S. and Europe there to participate in a one-day intensive planting design workshop led by Piet and his writerly counterpart, Noel Kingsbury.
Few tourists think to visit Groningen, the northernmost capital of the Netherlands.
My tattered copy of Lonely Planet lists the main local activity in the sparsely populated region as wadlopen or mud-walking out in the open flats of the North Sea. They also mention something about pig farms.
From what I saw, they’re missing out. Because Groningen also happens to be an ideal base from which to explore an alternate universe of garden design. And that’s exactly what we set out to do last July on the ‘Gardens Illustrated Tour of the Dutch Northern provinces ‘ led by English garden writer, Noel Kingsbury and his wife, Jo Elliott.
When one of the world’s leading photographers of hyper-beautiful gardens decides that beauty is no longer enough, it captures your attention.
In this most recent Talk, we heard first hand from Australian photographer Claire Takacs about her epic two-year journey to explore and document 80 of the most innovative garden landscapes from around the world.
For this trip, her focus shifted to projects that dare to take on the bigger questions about sustainability, pollution, biodiversity, and urbanization, all in the face of climate change. The solutions found and realized are astounding. And in many cases, beautiful in a whole other way.
Claire collaborated with multi-talented Italian landscape architect and writer Giacomo Guzzon to create a monumental book based on these travels:– Visionary: Gardens and Landscapes for Our Future.
