Netherlanders III: The Oudolf Effect

My first glimpse of Rotterdam is a blast of pure future shock.

Exiting the concrete slab and webbed glass roof of the Centraal train station, the cityscape comes on like a massive architectural experiment gone wild.

Lurching from breathtaking to brutalist all in the same block, the skyline is a riot of modernity. Yet it’s sown from the seeds of destruction – its historic city core demolished by German bombers at the start of WWII.

Rotterdam is the city that literally arose from its own ashes. And ever since, an irresistible magnet for generations of architects and landscape designers drawn to fill the void.

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. Designed in 2010, these gardens form part of the Boompjes promenade, a ribbon of greenspace winding along the north bank of the River Maas. It’s a stupendous setting – running right through the centre of town. The promenade opens up into a series of smaller quays, parks and boulevards where people gather to bike, chill, or watch the ceaseless boats stream by in the main channel of Europe’s busiest port.

The riverfront itself plays like a scene out of Bladerunner (minus the tears in the rain). The Oudolf plantings are set in the parks of Leuvehoofd and Westerkade respectively – right near the iconic Swan Bridge, a striking construction which spans the river like some kind of giant cosmic harp.

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.

The short video below neatly captures the scene – looking across the harbour mouth to the Leuvehoofd garden.

A Modern Dance

My first encounter here came in early evening with the last golden threads of sunlight illuminating the scene like a halo. A river of interwoven grasses, flickering drifts of perennials, shimmered in the sparkling backlight with the obelisk of an enormous war memorial rising in the background. The plantings themselves, are configured into a triangular series of raised beds, each framed in smooth black stone stepping down to the river.

By this stage of my trip, I could read the garden almost like a kind of visual music – orchestrated into a flow of shapes, rhythms, shifting patterns and interplay. Still in the afterglow of the planting design workshop at Hummelo, here was a kind of master class for a party of one.

I drank it all in – how the mood of the planting changed with the light and wind, the creative decisions apparent, the seamless melding of different planting styles, which is so characteristic of Oudolf’s more recent work. You can see how this plays out in a section of the original planting design in the second image below.

Of course, there was the perennial fascination of the plants themselves, alone and in combination (click on the photos for the botanical names) – many species so familiar from my own garden and others startlingly new. I looked, looked, and looked some more until the last traces of daylight fell from the sky.

Westerkade: Along the Boulevard

The next day, I cycled over to his other public garden at Westerkade out along a cobblestone boulevard – with  a series of long black stone planters facing out to the river.

This planting had a different feeling yet again with a palette of plants selected for the dappled light with picks like my fave grass Spodiopogon sibiricus, shell-pink Japanese Anemones, feathery Aruncus, and radiant ferns. Interestingly for an Oudolf design, it features a highly-varied planting with a combination of perennials, trees and shrubs.

The Inner Plantsman

I’d come to the Netherlands to learn not just about New Perennial gardens – but about the people who make them.

In the case of Piet, I learned how he amassed his working knowledge of perennials in over 30 years as a plantsman, gathering his palette of plants from all over Europe; how he experimented over years with relentless trial and error at Hummelo together with his wife and muse, Anja running the nursery. How an idea for a more naturalistic approach to garden design first sparked and took shape amongst kindred souls like his friends, designer Henk Gerritsen and philosopher/writer Rob Leopold. And how it took root through open days held at the Oudolf Nursery where designers, gardeners, fellow nursery owners. and artists gathered together to exchange plants and ideas.

This has all been a very slow fuse  lit decades ago. By his own reckoning, Piet is no overnight sensation and something of a late-bloomer – hitting his creative stride in his mid-50s with a string of international commissions starting in England at RHS Wisley, Battery City Park in NYC, and gathering momentum from there.

(Side Note: Piet and Noel Kingsbury’s next book will apparently focus on the personal history of how all this came to be – with the inside story of the Dutch Wave. Due sometime later this year.)

Never content to merely repeat himself, Piet has always been compelled to innovate. Perhaps that is the price of genius – to rise to a level only the artist themselves can imagine. Most critically, he has changed the way we look at plants and their place in the gardens. Opened our eyes to the beauty of death and decay in a hyperreal expression of nature. Consciously working with materials designed to transform in space and time.

A Leap Beyond

Such achievements put him in rare company. I think of Picasso and Braque at the dawn of Cubism – where they shifted the focus of art towards the abstract reality of the painting itself. I think of guitarist Jimi Hendrix bending feedback beyond noise into a message from the cosmos. I think of Icelandic songstress Björk and her sublime art pop meets electronica. Each of these epochal artists fundamentally changed how we perceive and experience our world.

With Oudolf, it’s a shift in how we experience the idea of nature in our public spaces. Look no further than The High Line for proof. Even if you don’t know the designer by name. You know the effect.

Synchronicity in the Air

As I write this in early March 2014, I’ve just heard the great news that Piet has been awarded the Rotterdam-Maaskant Prize, one of the Netherland’s highest honours in the field of architecture, urban planning and landscape architecture. In their decision, the Dutch jury  makes a point strikingly similar to my own: “…praising Oudolf not only as a creative genius and craftsman, but also because of the social significance of his projects”. This award recognizes the complete oeuvre of his work as a planting designer, teacher, and author. Last I checked, he’s far from finished too.

Speaking at Hummelo at our workshop, Piet surprised the group by saying it’s only in the past five years that he’s felt truly free in his work. A revealing admission from an artist whose work has always seemed so liberated to the rest of us. The reality is something else again – that his designs are intensely orchestrated, planned down to the last metre on paper in a highly-codified visual language.

Rotterdam was my own moment in space to ruminate upon such things. I also found time for things other than gardens – with a few expeditions kindly suggested by Piet himself, whose interests include art, food, and culture in many forms.

Onderzeebootloods

My mind was likewise expanded at a group showing at the Submarine Wharf (Onderzeebootloods), an industrial space of cathedral-like proportions containing a fantastical collection of supersized art pieces.

I cycled everywhere on a small fold-up bike, taking the waterbus down past the endless shipping wharves to the old world town of Dordrecht half an hour away. Then it was back to Rotterdam, for some quality food excursions, random conversations with the very friendly locals, and a taste of the night life as the North Sea Jazz Festival swung into town.

Jazz. Such a ripe analogy to the making of a garden and the coda to my journey. An exploration of musical space in the language of time. And here in the Netherlands, I’d met the makers and most definitely found the groove.