Five Seasons: the Gardens of Piet Oudolf / Năm mùa trong những khu vườn của Piet Oudolf

Piet Oudolf is not so much a garden designer as a plant artist. He layers perennial plants with grasses by the thousands, and the result is a progression of life that flows between the spaces in a plant bed, between the edges of time and, most powerfully, between the contours of our imagination.

Oudolf came out of a movement in the early 1980s called the Dutch Wave, and today, at 73, he stands as the patriarch of contemporary garden making. You might liken his plant compositions to the frenetic glory of his countryman Willem de Kooning, except the fury is replaced with a dense, living canvas that never seems to lose its serenity, even as it builds dynamically through the growing season. “Gardening is a promise,” he says. “You’re looking forward to what will be there.”

Oudolf is best known for his plantings along the High Line in New York, but filmmaker Thomas Piper first encountered his work at another high-profile project, the Lurie Garden in Chicago’s Millennium Park.