Five Seasons

`Five Seasons, the Gardens of Piet Oedouf', is a film I saw yesterday. (It's playing at Belgrave Cinema today, too.)

A venerable designer in the Dutch wave or New Perennial movement, Oedouf designs gardens with a matrix of grasses with perennials in, often, blocks as opposed to naturalistic meadows. Tall perennials must have good structure and features, like attractive seedheads, so that the winter months have subtle beauty with texture in tones of brown and grey. The perennials and tall grasses are mown down in late winter.

Oudolf began his garden style in the 1980s when he and his wife Anja opened their nursery, in Holland. His early work with perennials consisted of block-type groupings based on structure and texture. More recently Oudolf's gardens have developed into a more naturalistic look, often using blends of species, with the `change in style...described as a shift from a painter's perspective to one informed by ecology'. Oedouf is probably best known for designing the plant matrix on New York's The High Line (2006), the ex-train line converted to a long raised garden, high up in the city.

Oedouf's work reminds me of Wolfgang Oehme & James van Sweden who began a somewhat similar love affair with tall grasses and perennials in the late 1970's. Inspired by American prairies, their the `New American Garden' style developed as a reaction to the anodyne lawns to be found in much of the US, and the ubiquitous box edging and roses.

 

I left the cinema and ran into a gardening acquaintance. `Are you going to change your garden?' he cried, moved more than me by the cinematic experience, which had lovingly lingered on the brown stalks of hibernating perennials, directing our gaze to the subtle beauty of Oedouf's plants. (Successfully - I challenge anyone seeing this film to not be moved by grasses with delicate cobwebs, perennials rimmed with frost and seedheads touched by snow.)

Well, no. But I feel so much better about the untrimmed Sedum (above; see post 17th March also) which have been bugging me. I loved my pale pink ones through much of the garden but I didn't think that the flowers retained their soft pink for long enough. They turned pink-red for a short time (and I really dislike pink and red together (and detest the similar salmon; we're all so different!) in the garden) then deep brown - all too soon. Was this plant worth it?

 

 

Moreover - I'd planned to trim the perennials before today's Mother's Day visit from in-laws (who have a neat and tidy garden-and-house aesthetic). A few untidy perennials (like sprawling obedient plant (Physostegia; if only it was!)) and old belladonna lily stalks got tidied up; good. But I haven't started on the sedum nor the tall stalks of Drymis maritima (Syn Urginea) (although I've cut down a few of the latter to collect seeds).

Snow is very rare and we don't get much frost here in Selby. Will the perennial seedheads, deteriorating over winter, look silly or beautiful? (The eye of the beholder - just J and me - is fine.)

I'm reminded of the gorgeous meadow you see as you enter Great Dixter (UK; above) where owner Christopher Lloyd overheard visitors exclaim that they weren't paying to enter the garden because `he hadn't even mown his lawns'! (Maybe I need to escort visitors around the garden and explain the new strategy.)

Professor James Hitchmough (my favourite lecturer at Burnley long ago) grows meadows of annuals in the UK with skill. (And remember the sweep of annuals, including sunflowers, near Fed Square, so beloved of Melbournians a couple of years ago?)

Oedouf's gardens are less naturalistic than Lloyd's meadows, and less subtle with large sweeps of high grasses and tall perennials; a different aesthetic and quite different result.

An aesthetic that doesn't rely on flowers (alone).

Brilliant.

Jill Weatherhead is horticulturist, writer, garden designer and principal at Jill Weatherhead Garden Design who lives in the Dandenong Ranges east of Melbourne, and works throughout Victoria. (www.jillweatherheaddesign.com.au)