It became a movement very slowly, and they call it one now because it was copied so much. It’s not that I don’t use trees and shrubs, because in every garden of mine there are trees and shrubs, but the focus at that time was on perennials. Oudolf: It was called the New Perennial movement, and in some places the Dutch Wave, because so many people came together in the 1980s and early ’90s with the idea that we should do something different in gardens and public spaces. It becomes a dialogue with the gardener or owner about how we can make the garden work in the future and keep its beauty. Maybe this plant doesn’t work anymore because the trees have grown too big. If plants are dying, we ask the gardeners what should be done. You’re always looking for the edge of control. We had to see what would happen, and I think that is losing control without losing control, because we take control when necessary. When I started to do public gardens like the High Line and the Lurie Garden at Millennium Park, we had to work with gardeners and with plants that were, both of them, growing and developing. For someone who is not a gardener, it looks uncontrolled, but it’s not-it’s just that you look more than you act, rather than acting without thinking. It is not that you lose control, but that you start to look differently.

At that time we didn’t even think about the birds, but only about aesthetics and how we could extend this beauty through the seasons.

We stopped cutting back the plants too early-the skeletons were attractive enough to leave. We found that the best way was to leave plants to go to seed. We started to discuss what we could do to make gardens more attractive not only for ourselves but also as living things. Traditional gardening is a sort of super-control of everything that happens there. Piet Oudolf: I’ve always seen gardening as control. Was that a methodology that was honed in this laboratory of your own garden? I’ve always been interested in the idea of how to negotiate control and not control, or organization and self-organization. Hans Ulrich Obrist: Piet, it would be great to hear more about your own garden at Hummelo, because I know you’ve left it to change freely with the seasons, in a very organic way.

Piet oudolf