When Matt met Piet
Legendary plantsman Piet Oudolf meets Matt Pottage, Curator at RHS Garden Wisley, to discuss plants, people and plans for the exciting new borders due to start this winter at Wisley
Matt : Back in the 1980s, nobody was gardening with grasses like you garden with grasses. I feel you started that trend. Did people think you were mad?
Piet: When we started the nursery in Hummelo in 1982, we also created gardens there for people to visit. That’s where I began to use grasses, in among more traditional garden plants. We had the plants that we all loved – lots of flowers, lots of decoration – but by putting the grasses in, it became all of a sudden a different garden. People would come to look at them. People liked them. We just had one problem: people didn’t buy them. But for me, gardening with grasses felt normal. It’s always felt normal. From a design approach, a grass is a good element – it has character, texture and winter appearance. And you know, when you so believe in something, you don’t think about what other people think.
© Mark Ashbee
Piet Oudolf’s home garden in the Dutch village of Hummelo
Matt: I feel the same about
Piet: We call it zeitgeist, or spirit of time. It happened unforeseen. Back then, I had to find my own way, and what I was missing from gardens at that time was spontaneity, so that’s why I tried to use a grass here, a grass there. I’d seed some Digitalis in among plants so that they could come up spontaneously. They were short-lived, but nevertheless, it looked already different by doing that. It was moving away from so many dogmas that existed, and exist still in gardening; you have to do this in November, and you have to do this in March, and cutting back… All these things we tried to forget at that time, and say: “That’s nonsense, you have to garden with your own ideas and feelings about your garden”.
Matt: That’s refreshing today, let alone 30-plus years ago. I wonder, are there any plant groups or any particular genera that you used lots in the early days but you don’t use so much now?
Piet: In the older days, I used a lot of plants that I would never use again. It’s not only that you have new ideas; when you work in public spaces, you see that if a lot of plants are short- lived or die in the first week of growth, you have to make changes. You learn a lesson every year. Astrantia: I love it. I use it everywhere, but you lose it, for sure. Or sometimes you love a plant – like Erigeron karvinskianus, a beautiful plant, or some Echinops – and then it seeds everywhere. I’m too eager sometimes with plants. You see them, fall in love with them and want to use them at the first available opportunity, but you don’t have enough experience of them. You lose yourself in your design, and it can go wrong. There are all these little traps in gardening, in design, but you learn from them.
A river of pastels in The Oudolf Field, Hauser and Wirth, Somerset
Matt: I’m similar, really. Sometimes your love of a plant carries you away. You’re desperate to have it or try it, even though you know deep down it’s misguided. And what about the reverse: plants that you rely heavily on now that you didn’t use so much in the early days?
Piet: It’s not so much that we’re using new plants, but new cultivars. For example with Vernonia, which is normally a tall plant of more than two metres, there are now more cultivars that are disease-free, beautiful, have nice leaves and are just one metre high. They’re an excellent addition to the late-flowering asters, and also
for texture. And we’re seeing a lot of umbellifers, such as Laserpitium and Cenolophium, that are becoming more important in this sort of natural style of gardening. They’re not new plants, they’re just species that we haven’t used before. So over the years, my planting palette has become stronger, but with less variety and fewer species. This way, we get gardens where all the plants perform in the way I have in mind.
Matt: We never stop learning. I’ve been at Wisley for 16 years, but every year the weather does something unexpected. Like last autumn, it was so wet and mild, and then within a week it was -10ºc. Plants didn’t have time to shut down for survival, so many that we thought would never die perished, while others we thought were tender behaved differently. And that’s just in this one place. As you work on many sites all around the world, how do you get to know a site intimately, quickly enough?
Piet: Take the High Line in New York. That is a roof garden. Sometimes that roof is a bridge, sometimes it’s a restaurant, sometimes it’s a household. We planted over one and a half miles in different situations. One year, we lost all our Hamamelis – a shrub that is winter hardy – on a particular part, because of the heat coming from the building underneath. The plants started to grow and to leaf out so early in the winter, that the next heavy spell of frost killed almost all of them in that area. In some places we saw tulips flowering three weeks before they should. So you never know what you’re doing until you do it.
Matt: We had extreme cold last December. We lost nearly every Hebe and Pittosporum at Wisley. But that doesn’t mean we will never plant them again, because you can’t just garden for the very extremes. You have to accept that things have bad years, or a bad season, and that’s OK.
© Matt Pottage
Hoar frost at RHS Wisley in 2023
Piet: All plants will suffer from extremes. The problem of today is, the climate is changing so quickly that you don’t know what to expect next year. It’s very hard. And you cannot respond by changing your plant palette from North European to South European – all the plants would die from winter wetness and rot away.
Matt: The climate here at Wisley is more and more like the South of France. We obviously have to be aware of that, but as a demonstration garden, we’re not going to throw the baby out with the bathwater – you don’t want to just dig up all the astilbes, all the primulas, all the trilliums and the lilies, and say: ‘this is a garden of olives and pencil cypress’. It’s a balance. There are some plants that are happy here and you can see that if all the team left tomorrow and the site closed, they would go on living. And there’s a percentage of plants that would be dead in two minutes.
Piet: It is not so easy to make a public park; it is not so easy to get the right people on board who understand plants. It is a matter of understanding, of saying: “This is where we have to interfere, this is where we have to let it go.”
Many people think maintaining a garden is just about going around taking the weeds out. But that's not it.
“With any garden, you don’t hoe it into the future, you have to guide it into the future”
Piet Oudolf
Matt: That’s a really good point. I don’t think anything is no-maintenance, unless it’s nature. If you’re intervening to manage a population of plants for a display, it’s gardening.
Piet: I don’t talk about outside the garden, because outside the garden that’s nature, or farmland, or woodland, but that’s beyond my expertise. That’s why I think what we do is for people who have gardens, who can learn from the way we garden and see that it is not just about flowers, it is also about seasonality; spring, summer, autumn; decay, death, decline; everything inclusive. I’ve always felt that is my passion, to show that to people, and to show what plants do together and how they can touch you. We see ourselves – and probably you do too, Matt – as sort of educators. We try to bring things into the world that people have never thought about before.
Matt: For me, I want people to be inspired. I want people to feel excited. I want people to take away either an idea or a plant or a way of using a plant that they’ve never seen before. And they may not copy it like for like, but I want them to feel motivated to try something new. So when I see people making notes or taking photos of labels, that excites me; I feel like we’re achieving something. And I don’t think a garden should ever stand still. We always want to keep Wisley dynamic. This is a large part of why I’m personally so excited that you’re transforming the Glasshouse Borders that you originally designed here going back more than 20 years.
The existing Glasshouse borders designed by Piet Oudolf in 2001
Piet: The existing borders still worked for a lot of people. But for me, in the last few years, they have started to feel a bit tired. After 20 years, you can imagine that your work has changed, your experience has changed, your ideas have changed. That’s why I thought, with the new design, we should not do it so formal, so straight; we should create a garden that is more fluid, that people can meander through, where every corner has a different view of the garden. So it has more perspective, more depth and more layers.
Matt: It’s going to be a massive change for visitors to be able to walk among the planting, in a sea of grasses and perennials. That new sinuous, organic flow I think will be really impactful. I’m really excited about it.
Piet: You’ll get lost, I think, in the new Wisley borders. You won’t want to leave. I remember talking about the original borders in the early 2000s. I had to explain my drawings for the Board of Directors, which was very traditional at the time. One comment that stuck with me was: “There’s not much colour in the border.” That is the difference between then and now. It’s not only about colour, it’s about seeing a different world. And it’s about emotional contact with your surroundings.
In the past, as people walked around a garden, it was just: “Oh how beautiful, I have to have that, where can I buy it?” But with contemporary gardens now – and you also see it in the work of Tom Stuart-Smith and Dan Pearson – it’s about the experience. People feel more in gardens that are made today. It’s more emotional. In a sense, it’s like a big stage where plants perform; they act and interact with the visitors.
Symphyotrichum ‘Little Carlow’ in the Glasshouse Borders at RHS Wisley
Matt: Thirty years ago, people were obsessed with flowers and colour. Whereas now we talk about texture, form, structure and movement. There’s a bigger palette of qualities that you look for in planting, rather than just colour. And being the curator who got rid of all the summer bedding plants here, you know, that was a shock for a lot of people. I mean, it happened quite a few years ago, when I committed these crimes, but now we don’t garden so much at the expense of the environment. Where we had bedding plants before, there are cloud-pruned shrubs in different colours. So it’s not just about flowers. And every year we have more visitors, so people clearly are OK with it. But when you do something that’s new and different, you can’t expect everybody to get it straight away.
Piet: I feel it happens once in a generation, I think, that people are changing. Sometimes it happens by shocks, sometimes more slowly. I remember articles about my work saying, “is this kind of gardening passé?”. They thought what I did was something temporary, and then it would turn back to the gardening that we all know. But that is not happening. And I strongly feel it is not going to happen. Because people are more and more interested in how plants work together – plant communities, plant ecology, how can we make the world better.
Matt: Yes, you have to hold your nerve and think, “yeah, this is the right direction”, otherwise you just don’t do anything, or what you do is really boring.
Piet: In all my work, there is passion involved, which makes me do what I do. Your passion overrules any negative comments. Your passion makes you do things that are probably not normal. And I think there are moments, like you asked in the beginning: “are you not afraid of what people say when they see your gardens?”. But I never think about it when I design. If you think about that, you would never do anything of any value.
