“I love plants – that is the main thing of all,” says acclaimed Dutch garden designer Piet Oudolf. “I love the way they change, the dynamics and the beauty of everything you can see in them.”
This short film is a four-minute teaser for the upcoming documentary by Tom Piper, Piet Oudolf: Fall, Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall, set for release next year.
Oudolf’s devotion to plants is clear to see in the radiantly beautiful gardens he creates for clients all over the world. The High Line in New York City, perhaps his most well-known garden, typifies his layered approach to creating gardens that embrace the changes of each season.
The gentle wildness Oudolf achieves is the result of careful planning – evident here in his sketches for a perennial meadow at Durslade Farm, which will house a new contemporary arts centre in Somerset, England. His drawings full of colourful stippled patterns reveal an artist’s sensibility that he applies to the landscape. This film expertly captures the painterly compositions of Oudolf’s gardens, with their textured base coats of undergrowth and finer brush strokes of plants in flower.
He draws a comparison between what he does and contemporary art, which questions what constitutes beauty in order to make people look closer.
“Seeing beauty in ugliness, beauty in death, beauty in decay, beauty in the unexpected, that is part of my life too.”
Piet Oudolf: Open Field, an exhibition of sketches of his works is hosted at Hauser & Wirth Somerset, where he is also designing a 1.5-acre garden, which will be open to the public from 14 September 2014.
Flip through our Lookbook of hand-drawn sketches of the Hauser & Wirth garden as well as of his other renowned projects.
Piet Oudolf: Open Field is on show until 5 October 2014.
