This fall, Planting Fields will welcome a new landscape that reimagines what a garden can be – a living composition of plants, textures, and seasonal moments designed to inspire wonder throughout the year.
While many traditional gardens are designed to be admired from one vantage point or another, a Piet Oudolf garden invites total immersion. Every path reveals a new perspective as sweeping drifts of perennials and grasses create an ever-changing landscape rich with texture, movement, and seasonal beauty. It’s a garden designed not just to be seen, but to be experienced.
In parts of the garden, Piet’s design includes bold, graphic blocks of plants. My mother is a quilter, so it’s easy for me to see the layout as a patchwork of plants, stitched together in a rhythm across the garden. Familiar plants repeat, but in each place they’re set in fresh combination with the other blocks around. Sometimes differences in flower color create an interesting contrast between neighboring groups, while in other areas or at other times of year it might be something more subtle such as contrasting texture of the leaves that makes things interesting. As the plants grow and change through the seasons, these variations create endless fascination and excitement.
As Landscape Curator, it’s been incredibly rewarding to help bring this vision to life. Every plant has been thoughtfully placed to contribute to a larger story that will continue to evolve in the months and years ahead.
With over 120 varieties of plants in the garden, we have to be very careful to be sure we’re faithfully following the plan. There are often subtle shifts from one area of the garden to another. For example on the north side we have dense blazing star (Liatris spicata), with tall purple spikes of flowers, while on the south side we have the white form (Liatris spicata ‘Alba’) of that same plant. Visitors may recognize the shape of the plant from one side of the garden to the other, but that change in color gives a different feeling in the different areas. As these plants came into flower last month we actually realized that we’d put the wrong color in one of those blocks, which totally threw off that color story. So to remain faithful to Piet’s vision we switched them out. Little things like that seem simple, but together they add up to a truly fascinating garden that rewards further exploration each time you visit.
When the garden opens this fall, I hope visitors will do more than admire it. I hope they’ll slow down, wander, and follow their interest down those winding paths to see what’s around the corner. This garden is not just a few nice views of plants, it’s a total immersive experience! I think those first steps into the garden will feel interesting and new, and with so much change in store I am excited for visitors to see it, and then also to return often to discover something new with every season.
from from Landscape Curator, Peter Slothower