design | Piet Oudolf's Gardens: Embracing Life's Natural Cycles
Without quite realizing when it happened, we began feeling more drawn to understated, natural gardens filled with brown grasses and small wild flowers than to traditional English gardens bursting with large, showy blooms. What if this shift wasn't just a matter of taste, but like many cultural movements, was actually started by someone? Meet Piet Oudolf, the Dutch garden designer who has quietly transformed garden trends worldwide, from New York's High Line and The Battery to countless other groundbreaking landscapes.
Hauser & Wirth Sommerset. Photo by Jason Ingram. Courtesy Piet Oudolf and Hauser and Wirth
Piet Oudolf in the Hauser & Wirth Somerset garden, Courtesy Piet Oudolf and Hauser and Wirth
Piet Oudolf. Though his name might sound unfamiliar, it's currently one of the most respected in garden and landscape design. He first gained recognition in the 1980s through his own garden in Hummelo, Netherlands. From Chicago's Millennium Park Lurie Garden to New York's Lower Manhattan Battery (formerly Battery Park), Manhattan's westside High Line park, the landscaping and gardens at England's Hauser & Wirth Somerset gallery and art center, and most recently the garden at Swiss furniture brand Vitra's campus in Weil am Rhein, Germany—all these world-renowned gardens that have captured global attention were created by him.
Hauser & Wirth Sommerset. Photos by Jason Ingram. Courtesy Piet Oudolf and Hauser and Wirth
Piet Oudolf is famous for changing not just landscapes, but how we perceive nature itself. He helps us appreciate the beauty found not only in a plant's color, but in its form, structure, and texture. Beyond that, he has embraced the entire cycle of plants—from birth through life to death—as a virtue that gardens should display, making visitors anticipate new discoveries each season, each year. This is why perennial plants take center stage in his garden designs. Removing prejudices and revealing timeless beauty—people call him a pioneer of the "New Perennial Movement," which sparked fresh interest in perennial plants.
"If you have beautiful plants, it doesn't mean your garden is beautiful. Something is complete when everything works together." – Piet Oudolf
Hauser & Wirth Sommerset. Photos by Jason Ingram. Courtesy Piet Oudolf and Hauser and Wirth
The Journey Begins: Hummelo Garden
One fascinating aspect of the documentary Five Seasons: The Garden of Piet Oudolf (2017, directed by Thomas Piper) is when Piet recalls his younger days as he was discovering garden design. Having no interest in inheriting his parents' bar and restaurant business, Piet moved to the city with his wife Anja and tried everything from factory work to fish wholesaling. He had a strong feeling that he could do something different from what he'd known before—something creative—but he didn't know what that was. The last thing he tried was working at a garden center. There, he realized that "plants" were the answer.
Hummelo garden featured in Hummelo: A Journey Through a Plantsman's Life. Courtesy The Monacelli Press 
Piet and Anja in their Hummelo garden. Image from Hummelo: A Journey Through a Plantsman's Life. Courtesy The Monacelli Press
Piet and Anja found a 19th-century farmhouse on the outskirts of Hummelo, a small Dutch village, and in 1982, began a nursery there with his wife. The plan was to make a living while supplying plants needed for his own garden designs. On one acre of land, they cultivated both nursery and garden together. They focused on perennials, seeking out diverse and rare cultivars uncommon in the local area, and the unique atmosphere created by these various plants drew people from around the world seeking inspiration. This is also the most impressive part of the film—despite the passage of many years, you can clearly see that the pastoral, romantic garden atmosphere of that time became the foundation of Piet Oudolf's current style.
Gardens That Share Artistic Inspiration
Piet Oudolf's garden is like an abstract painting. Rather than focusing on what people will see in the garden, he concentrates on what they will feel. For example, showcasing specific plants isn't important. Instead, the goal is to evoke the life of plants, changing seasons, various emotions, and inspiration through the overall composition. He believes this is truly how people want to experience gardens.
His design approach is equally impressive. Though you might think that creating intuitive, spontaneously inspiring gardens means handling plants however the mood strikes, it's actually quite the opposite. There's an anecdote about the 1994 Utrecht Botanical Garden in the Netherlands, his first public project. Piet Oudolf had been silent after taking on the project, then showed up on construction day and proceeded to arrange complex plant placements without any drawings. In his mind, the image of the plants was already more vivid than what his eyes could see—and he even understood how they would evolve over time. This approach of his recalls the thoroughness of a symphony composer who understands the characteristics and tones of various instruments to create heavenly music, or an orchestra conductor.
"My biggest inspiration is nature. The idea of my work is not to copy nature, but to recreate spontaneous emotion of nature." – Piet Oudolf
Hummelo garden featured in Hummelo: A Journey Through a Plantsman's Life. Courtesy The Monacelli Press
According to Noel Kingsbury, a British garden writer and designer who co-authored Hummelo: A Journey Through a Plantsman's Life (The Monacelli Press) with Piet Oudolf, Piet cannot stand repeating himself. Each project features new plant combinations and layers, fresh arrangement methods and techniques. In the process, his designs have naturally evolved closer to wild nature. His various public projects clearly demonstrate this evolution.
Changing Perceptions of Urban Landscaping: Lurie Garden and The Battery
Chicago's Millennium Park Lurie Garden was where Piet Oudolf first experimented with pure, natural-feeling wild planting. In his words, it's a garden you can "conduct, but not control." In 2002, while preparing the Lurie Garden project, Piet Oudolf visited the Schulenberg Prairie near Chicago and discovered the new appeal of North American native plants. Upon returning from the trip, he scrapped his previous Lurie Garden design and created a new composition featuring North American prairie native plants as protagonists.
The result? It changed how city dwellers approach public landscaping. Here, gardens aren't just something to pass by, but places to stop and quietly collect your thoughts, to recall life's mysteries through unfamiliar plants. What's more, the unique harmony displayed by the plants provides daily life with distinctive inspiration.
Lurie Garden in Chicago featured in Hummelo: A Journey Through a Plantsman's Life. Courtesy The Monacelli Press
The next major project was The Battery (formerly Battery Park) at Manhattan's southern tip. This 25-acre park, flanked by New York Harbor to the south and the Hudson River to the west, is popular with New Yorkers and tourists who come to jog or catch ferries. Its unique location has given it a diverse history—it was once a stage for Native American activities and later served as an immigrant gateway.
Piet Oudolf's mission was to create a new garden feeling on top of the master plan established in the 1980s. On 195,000 square feet of land, he skillfully arranged London plane trees and tens of thousands of perennial and bulb plants in multiple layers. The result was gardens that speak to visitors with different feelings depending on the season, time of day, and area. Particularly considering the adjacent World Trade Center, therapeutic gardens and walkways were designed to offer visitors new hope and comfort. Citizens became curious about the unusual plants they saw here, and a special guidebook was even created to introduce each individual plant.
The Battery in Lower Manhattan. Courtesy The Battery Conservancy
Another Wild Leap: The High Line
Piet Oudolf became the foremost name to remember for public garden projects that create new connections between cities and people. The High Line park project marked the pinnacle of this achievement. In 2004, the High Line management team, which was planning an innovative renovation of the elevated railway that had been abandoned for 40 years, reached out to him. Lead designer James Corner had an ambitious vision and asked Piet Oudolf to "Keep It Wild"—maintaining the area's unique wild feeling. He also wanted each section of the narrow, elongated High Line to be composed of plants with different atmospheres, so visitors could feel the change of location as they walked.
The High Line section at 20th Street. Photo by Timothy Schenck. Courtesy Friends of the High Line
An unusual setting for a garden and scenario-like specific direction—the High Line was a challenge that elevated Piet Oudolf's design to another level. Finally, from 2006 to 2019, each section of the High Line was opened to the public in four phases. Above it grew vegetation that reflected the natural feeling of woodland and prairie areas, as well as the history of this former industrial district. Visitors came to enjoy the special mood and fragrance of its near-wild nature, encountering various emotions—including the romantic feeling of escape, as if they had left the city.
The High Line. Photo by Timothy Schenck. Courtesy Friends of the High Line