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Bringing Hummelo Home

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.

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Netherlanders III: The Oudolf Effect

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.

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The Netherlanders II: Gardens of Art and Obsession

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.

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Meeting the Netherlanders I: Plants, Places, People

In late June, I left my patch of Canadian woodland far behind to travel overseas to the Netherlands and Germany. I was a gardener on a mission to meet some luminaries of contemporary Dutch planting design and explore their gardens and nurseries in my version of a midsummer night’s dream. Above all else, this trip was about the chance to again meet visionary Dutch planting designer, Piet Oudolf on his home turf …

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The Gardener’s Speech: Bringing the High Line Home

This past Monday, the Parkdale Toronto Horticultural Society invited me to speak on a highly prescient theme: Bringing the High Line Home. It was a stellar opportunity to talk about the New Perennial planting style and my recent design workshop experience in the Netherlands. I presented a photographic odyssey of Piet Oudolf’s work intertwined with

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