Closing Time: Goodbye to Hummelo

After nearly 40 years of welcoming the world through its gates, the private garden of Piet and Anja Oudolf at Hummelo will close to the public for good at the end of this month.

For all lovers of this most quintessential garden that galvanized an entire movement in naturalistic planting design, the news cuts deep.

Word of its closing has spread like wildfire-weed amongst garden folk and it’s inspired a kind of spontaneous pilgrimage of people visiting Kwekerij Oudolf one last time.

On a recent weekend, buses were lined up outside Broekstraat 17 with over 100 cars parked along the country road.

Social media is swarming with heartfelt posts and photos from people taking their final strolls through the garden.

There’s an even larger flood of likes, loves, and comments from envious folks like myself who can’t be there in person.

Marking the moment

This is garden history in the making.

So, I’ve asked a few Dutch Dreamer photographer and designer friends to help mark the moment as I post this unofficial tribute to Hummelo through words, and photos, many of which were just taken in the past few weeks (hover to view credits.) There’s even a video created just for the occasion.

Sure, we can mourn the end of something truly great. But in true New Perennial style, let’s celebrate it too.

This includes you. Scroll down to the comments below the story and tell us what Hummelo means to you.

Cutting the knot

The decision to close to the public is perfectly understandable. While Anja has adroitly handled the flow of visitors (increasingly by the busload) just as she ran the Oudolf nursery for decades, Piet’s highly active public design work has become the priority.

After all these years of opening the garden to a curious world, Anja recognizes the reality that, “At a certain moment you have to cut the knot.”

Surely, they deserve their freedom.

For those of us fortunate enough to visit Hummelo over the years, the experience was often revelatory and near impossible to put into words.

I visited the garden twice in the past decade – at different points in the season – and each time the experience proved to be life-changing.

On a purely visual level, the fascination is endless in a garden where the paths circle into each other presenting a constantly shifting perspective of the myriad plantings.

As Piet reminds us, “It goes deeper than what you see”. There’s the feeling of reconnecting with the numinous mysteries of life itself. When plants are ascendant, we glimpse something beyond our merely human selves.

At Hummelo, it distinctly feels like the plants are watching you.

A love story

Whoever imagined back in the early 1980s that a dilapidated country farmhouse on a few acres in the eastern Netherlands near the small village of Hummelo would emerge to become a paragon of innovation in modern planting design?

It represents the life’s work of two indomitable creative spirits, Piet and Anja Oudolf who together renovated the house, raised a family, created epochal gardens, established a plant nursery, published books, and built a solo design practice from which Piet could export his vision to the world.

A living laboratory

The extensive Hummelo nursery was an integral piece of the puzzle. It served as a living laboratory for 28 years where Piet and Anja collected, propagated, trialed and refined what became his signature palette of robust perennials and grasses necessary for his designs.

The Oudolf plant catalogues were legendary as the nursery built a keen following with a reputation for wilder looking species and out of the box thinking.

You can view many of the seminal plants from the Hummelo nursery in the online image archive set up by American designer, Adam Woodruff.

After closing in 2010, Piet boldly transformed the former nursery space into a wild meadow experiment, combining structural perennials left over from the nursery stock with a matrix of native grasses and forbs grown from seed.

It’s a natural continuum of his design approach as he explores the line between control and freedom.

The Roots of Hummelo

Hummelo has always been a nursery of ideas where people and plants have crossed paths in unexpected and radical ways.

In the early 1980s, Piet and Anja hosted a series of Garden Days that became the genesis for a movement dubbed The Dutch Wave. The words of their philosopher friend, the late Rob Leopold, take us back to that time:

After a hesitant start in the mid-eighties, open weekends for the public at Piet Oudolf’s nursery in Hummelo quickly became something of a national event in Holland. These few days once a year when the keen amateur gardener could meet the professionals soon turned into a little Chelsea.

In the third weekend of August, young nursery-men, new style garden designers, progressive publishers, professional journals and a variety of garden foundations met with an enthusiastic and committed public, exchanging whatever they had to offer. Though aware of its small scale, Hummelo was a lively focus of the new movement during these few days of the year.

Plants and experience were exchanged, new contacts were made, projects were set in motion. Publishers and authors officially presented their latest books. One returned home afterwards full of impressions, new inspiration and the very latest ideas.

The collectively creative spirit was the progressive driving force behind the new movement. Nurserymen, garden pioneers, certain writers and photographers and a young publishing house formed, right from an early stage, a solid and enthusiastic group.

Nature and Garden Art, 1994

The last Garden Days in Hummelo were held in the summer of 1991 after which, it morphed into a fall event called Grassendaggen.

Another friend, Henk Gerritsen was an iconoclast with vast botanical knowledge who helped Piet to envision a starkly different idea of beauty in the garden – one which recognized the role all forms of life and death can play.

In his masterwork, Essay on Gardening, Henk captures the essence of the Dutch Wave as a movement with no agenda:

It was never a movement in the usual sense of the word, which has clearly defined objectives. Everyone was (and is) too individualistic for that. It was rather a counter-movement, the most important elements of which were, in the words of Rob Leopold: natural diversity, individual values of perception and artistic development’. In other words, a ‘movement’ therefore that puts an end to all previous movements and their strictly prescribed rules.

To go deeper into the history, Piet’s biography, Oudolf Hummelo: A Journey Through a Plantsman’s Life written by frequent collaborator Nöel Kingsbury is the definitive point of departure.

A higher frequency

It’s awe-inspiring to think how Hummelo has evolved from those early days. Everyone will have their own take on what makes it so extraordinary.

The garden itself will continue to grow away from public view, except of course, we can always keep in touch via Piet’s presence on Instagram.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVPAEwqH-I4&t=4s https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=25&v=MVPAEwqH-I4

Hans van Horssen, the photo-laureate of the New Perennial movement and a designer in his own right, created this marvellous short video just for the occasion.

We can also summon a place like Hummelo through poetry to find ourselves once again in a garden we will never forget:

A garden is more than meets the eye
growth from the past
growth still to come
strolling through a garden
is like wandering through a vast memory
everything has an origin
faraway places always remembered
bonds with friends
some dead but immortal here
growth rings
you are the garden

Translated from Dick Hellenius, Collected Poems

Closing Time

Ah. Reality sets in. Only a few short weeks left till the final day on October 27th. If you can go, go!

How can we ever possibly thank Piet and Anja for making Hummelo what it has become?

One way is to share what it means to you. “Sharing is multiplying” as I once heard Piet say at Hummelo, talking about both plants and ideas.

All stories welcome. Goodbye, adieu, vaarwel.

A Royal Salute

On the final Saturday on October 27th, the Dutch King Willem-Alexander recognized Piet Oudolf as Officer in the order of Orange Nassau, a chivalric order open to individuals who have earned special merits for society.

What a fairytale ending to a remarkable year.

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Special thanks to the following Dutch Dreamers and contributors who graciously provided images for this post: Hans van Horssen, Adam Woodruff, Piet Oudolf, Guy Henderieckx, Edwin Barindrecht, Laura Ekasetya, Marcel Silkens, Tony Spencer, and Charlie Hopkinson, Jan Ruland van den Brink, Bart Heynen, Louis-Philippe Beauduin. Check individual photo captions for credits.