Au Naturale

Bill Watters

Apr 21

Landscaping Sucks

As spring has arrived, my attention turns to the outside of our house. Last season, we did what I call foundational landscaping work, a new patio, regrading and water control, and planting. I struggle with plantings and translating how I want to feel in a landscape with what that actually looks like in terms of real plants. I quickly become overwhelmed with all the options and what works with the sun, soil, and maintenance. I don’t have the training or the knowledge of a landscape architect. What I do know is the feeling I get when I experience good landscaping. Good landscaping, for me, is best felt when landscaping doesn’t feel like landscaping but feels more natural or made by nature.

My family and I recently spent some time in Asheville, NC, and visited the Biltmore Estate. The surrounding gardens and landscaping at Biltmore (1890) were created by Fredrick Law Olmsted, who was also the mastermind of Central Park (1853). The Biltmore employs 60 gardeners to trim trees and sculpting bushes, pulling weeds, planting annuals, cutting grass, and edging flower beds. The gardens are immaculate but feel formal and manicured and a bit unnatural to me.

When I think about the times when I most enjoyed the experience of a man-made garden, it leads me to the work of Piet Oudolf. His work has helped me better understand the landscape I enjoy, and I believe it will help me achieve the look and feel I am searching for. He speaks of landscape design in more architectural terms and focuses on the more structural elements of the plants instead of color. Because of my architecture background, that makes more sense to me.

“Structure is the most important component in successful planting; color is important too, but it is a secondary consideration.”

He is the foremost leader of the “New Perennial” movement. Perennial plants live for more than two years; they dry out in the fall and reappear in the spring after a little trimming, a process called deadheading. Oudolf uses this process as part of his designs, leaving the dried stalks and seed heads to create visual structures through the fall and winter and provides food and habitat for wildlife.

“A plant is only worth growing if it looks good when it is dead.”

His gardens are made mostly of clumping perennial flowering varieties and grasses, what he calls a “matrix” style. Grasses are used as a foundation for the flowering varieties, creating a background for the flowers to stand out and use the height of the grass for visual structure throughout the seasons.

“The skeleton of the plants are for me as important as the flowers.”

I like this style of planting because over the years, it allows species to self-sow; they could disappear from one area only to reappear in another that is more suitable to them. I find this to be a more natural way of gardening. Nature is doing what nature does.

Oddly enough, the work of Piet Oudolf has been with me for some years in various ways, and I didn’t even realize it. Thinking back on these encounters is like finding a missing puzzle piece.

Piece 1

While in Chicago (2009?), we stopped at Millennium Park to see Frank Gehry’s outdoor concert pavilion. I remember walking through this garden area and thought how nice it felt because it didn’t feel like being in the city. The wind was moving this wispy grass around that I reached out and touched, and it reminded me more of a meadow than a garden. It was a nice nature moment in the middle of the city. This was The Lurie Garden at the Millennium Park in Chicago (2003), designed by Piet Oudolf.

Piece 2

One of my favorite architectural follies was The Serpentine Pavilion of 2011 by Peter Zumthor, a hortus conclusus (secret garden) which was a structure built surrounding a garden by Oudolf. The all-black structure was built in London to contain this garden and allow the visitor to escape the city and focus and contemplate the garden. The architecture complements the garden.

Piece 3

Interestingly, I think all of us here at the studio experienced a Piet Oudolf garden when we went to New York City and spent some time on the High Line. I remember while walking the High Line how it didn’t feel like a garden. It felt natural for trees, grasses, and wildflowers to be there as if they have always been there.

I am looking forward to the next time I’m in Detroit to experience the new Oudolf garden that has been planted on Detroit’s Belle Isle, opening in the summer of 2021. Instead, ironically Belle Isle Park was designed by the aforementioned Fredrick Law Olmsted in 1880, though only parts of his design were carried out. Belle Isle has undergone a revitalization in the past 10 yrs restoring and reopening the Albert Kahn designed aquarium (1904) and creating the Belle Isle Conservancy, working to restore, preserve, protect and enhance Belle Isle. Part of which includes this new Oudolf garden.