Gardenista Giveaway: Landscape Designer Piet Oudolf's New Book - Gardenista
To celebrate the 70th birthday of Dutch plantsman Piet Oudolf–whose romantic drifts of painterly grasses and perennials have made him the most copied landscape designer alive–The Monacelli Press is publishing a new book about his private garden. Hummelo: A Journey Through a Plantsman’s Life goes on sale today and in partnership with The Monacelli Press, we will be giving away five copies of the book to Gardenista readers. When garden designer Oudolf and his wife Anja moved with their two young sons to an eastern Netherlands farmhouse on a one-acre plot in 1982, there was no garden and no nursery where he could grow plants for his business. In Hummelo, British garden writer Noel Kingsbury tells the story of how Oudolf and his wife managed, with hard work and her cut-flower business, to gradually create a garden that embodied the ideas of today’s New Perennials movement. Hummelo also has 300 color photos and biographical essays about a half dozen earlier gardeners, from Mien Ruys to Karl Foerster, who influenced Oudolf’s work. In 2010, Oudolf replaced his plant nursery with a meadow where late-flowering perennials compete with large sweeps of perennial grasses. Piet and Anja Oudolf at home. In winter, Oudolf leaves perennial grasses standing to create moody textures and silvery color in the landscape. Pennisetum viridescens is one of Oudolf’s favorite grasses.