This is a movement which belongs to no one.
In truth, because the New Perennial movement can belong to anyone and everyone.
First and foremost, it’s about seeing plants in all their four-dimensional splendour and experiencing the slow-motion fireworks, which ensue as they flow and interact.
You don’t need a garden to do that. Just the pupils in your eyes.
I’m delighted to break something of a silence.
Strange wondrous things have been in the works over the past few month. After much commotion, I’m elated to announce a quantum shift not just in my gardening life – but in my naked earthbound reality.
And it means moving up in the world. Particularly in terms of altitude.
After two years of searching for a place of our own here in Ontario, my partner Troy and I found a spectacular piece of land with an old cabin set high atop a ridge in the rolling glacial wilderness of Mono.
It’s now full-on spring in the sheltered woodland of my northern un-cottage garden.
The crabapple tree is weeping shell-pink blossoms as the red lady ferns unfurl from beneath its dappled shadow. Spiky filaments of Camassia and Allium light up the sunnier beds in a wandering halo of purple and blue.
If spring is about new life, it’s also about unearthing fresh ideas. With that in mind, here are my ‘spring theories’ – designed to either stir the imagination or stir the pot, as you will.
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.
My first glimpse of Rotterdam was a blast of pure future shock.
Walking out of the concrete slab and webbed glass roof of the Centraal train station, the cityscape comes on like a massive architectural experiment gone wild.
Now down to the final few days of my trip, I’d come south in mid-July to visit two of Piet Oudolf’s most recent public projects in the Netherlands. While these gardens express some of his latest design thinking, they’re not yet so well known to the outside world.
A powerful juxtaposition of nature recast in a hypermodern urban frame.
