Books: Hummelo - Piet's Evolution

If you've been to the High Line or Battery Park in NYC, or the Lurie Garden in Chicago, or if you're a landscape designer, then you know all about Dutch landscape designer and plantsman Piet Oudolf.  But there's a lot -- and I mean a lot --  you don't know about his life, his methodology, and his work.

Teaming up again with the well-known British garden writer Noel Kingsbury, Oudolf, in this new book, Hummelo: A Journey Through a Plantsman's Life (Monacelli Press, 2015) takes you through his development as a designer, from his first interest in gardens and plants at around age 25 to his renown today as one of the world's top designers.

As Kingsbury notes in the introduction, Oudolf is part of new movement in planting design that focuses on ecological considerations.   It might be called "Dutch Wave," the "New Perennial Style," or the "New German Style" (or in the United States, the "New American Garden" style) -- but whatever you call it, Kingsbury says, it has three main tenets:  "a strong desire for a naturalistic aesthetic, sustainability, and a focus on creating a home for biodiversity." 

As you'll learn in this book, Piet was greatly influenced by Dutch landscape architect Mien Ruys, by German plantsman Karl Foerster, philosopher-gardener Rob Leopold, and many others in the Netherlands, Germany, and Britain. 

Hummelo, of course, is his own garden (and former nursery), where he carried on experiments with planting styles and began his career in design.  As his nursery flourished, so did his design business, and it really took off after he was featured in the British magazine Gardens Illustrated in 1994. The book has lovely profiles of the people who were and are his friends and collaborators, and it will take you through his garden techniques, from clipping to the perennial plant palette to blending, scatter plants, block and matrix plantings.  These terms, of course, are familiar to most who have read his previous books.  In this book, you'll learn how his ideas have changed over the years with beautiful photographs of his own garden and many projects around the the world. 

Most fascinating of all, you'll learn that Piet is always changing his mind and moving forward with new ideas.  As Kingsbury notes, "...essentially each project becomes a chapter in a story, a unique composition that reflects everything he has learned to date about plants and planting -- and is therefore necessarily different from anything he has done before."