Wisley, Royal Horticultural Society Garden, Surrey, England 3,400m2.

Witteveen Garden, Rotterdam,The Netherlands 3,000m2.

Potters Fields Park, London, England 2,500m2.

Boon Garden, Oost zaan, The Netherlands 2,500m2.

Il Giardino delle Vergini, Venice, Italy 2,000m2.

Barcelona Garden, Barcelona, Spain 1,000m2.

Hesmerg Garden, Sneek, The Netherlands 350m2.

Oudolf's detailed plans provide inspiration and insight for all interested in both small personal gardens and large-scale public landscapes. Noël Kingsbury's accessible text explains how each garden and the plants selected for it fit the specific environment. This glorious full-colour volume features twenty-three of Oudolf's most beautiful public and private gardens, including the widely acclaimed High Line and the Battery in New York City Wisley, the RHS Garden in Surrey the Pensthorpe Gardens in Norfolk the Lurie Garden in Millennium Park in Chicago and Il Giardino delle Vergini at the 2010 Venice Biennale. Oudolf challenges conventional approaches to gardening that rely on short-lived bursts of colour and constant maintenance and shows the delights of creating lasting, ecologically sound panoramas that relate to the landscape and the seasons. Perennials – prized for their beauty throughout their life cycle – are used almost exclusively.

Gross Max collaborates with Oudolf because he is able to “design a scheme with a genuinely distinctive look … a new, romantic look,” and it is certainly true that his gardens are both immersive and idiosyncratic.The first monograph on the Dutch landscape gardener Piet OudolfĪ leading figure in the New Perennial planting movement, garden and landscape designer Piet Oudolf emphasizes plant structure as the most important aspect of a successful garden. I have visited several of Oudolf’s gardens from the “permanent” UK landscapes to the RHS Garden Wisley in Surrey and Potters Field Park in London (by landscape architects Gross Max) the temporary installations of Il Giardino Delle Vergini, 2010 Venice Biennale, Italy, by architect Kazuyo Sejima and the 2011 Serpentine pavilion by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor. While the geometry of Oudolf’s designs varies, as Kingsbury states there are three distinct visual layers through which he creates a rhythm the technique used to achieve this includes “matrix, island and scatter.

Piet oudolf landscapes