VISTA: Leo den Dulk and the Dutch Wave

A little break from rural idyll yesterday to pop up to London's Garden Museum for the first in this year's ever-inspiring lecture series that is VISTA.

This time it was the Dutch garden historian Leo den Dulk, talking about all things Hollandic and especially the New Perennials/Dutch Wave/Prairie Planting/Insert Label As Required Movement (that's the trouble with Movements: everyone thinks they thought of it first). This is the subject of an absorbing exhibition at the Museum, which has plumped for Dutch Wave and has gathered together a wonderful and insightful collection of snippets about Piet Oudolf, Henk Gerritsen, and those they have influenced in Holland and here.

It was, as always, a wide-ranging and thought-provoking discussion which would take a blog post the length of a small book to do justice to: so I'll limit myself to the following little gems of inspiration and snippets of things I never knew before but do now.

Henk Gerritsen is a seriously good artist. There are a couple of his sketches in the exhibition and they are just beautiful.

The Dutch 'New' Wave started in the 1920s and isn't new at all if you're Dutch. It arose from a reaction against formal planting - herbaceous borders and the like - when young designers turned instead to informal, indigenous plants, many of which had never been worked with before, and did interesting things with them, later involving lots of crisply clipped yew by way of contrast. Leo was referring to them as 'mainstream' by the 1930s - a good 60 years before the movement arrived here.

Piet Oudolf is actually pronounced Peet Owdolf, not Peet Oodolf. Am very embarrassed that I have been saying it wrong for years.

Mien Ruys however is still impossible to pronounce if you're English. But I really, really, really want to visit.

William of Orange was a gardener. I hadn't cottoned on to this fact before. He made it his policy to 'garden the nation' (could do with a bit of that here), and first came to Britain not to invade (hah! as if!) but to look at the wonderful gardens he'd heard about here.

The Dutch invented guerrilla gardening not the Americans. And, said Leo proudly, they were doing it in broad daylight: which is probably why they didn't think there was anything that revolutionary about it.

They invented annual seed 'meadow' mixes too in case you thought Nigel Dunnett did it first. This time it was Dutch iconoclast and seedsman Rob Leopold who was responsible. This is a man I want to know more about: he is quite simply inspirational. There is a memorial page for him, set up following his recent untimely death, with contributions from Leo den Dulk, Noel Kingsbury and others.

Hippies don't come from Haarlem. Apparently.

Mien Ruys planted Japanese knotweed in her garden. It's still there, and maintained regularly, sandwiched between a path and a stream. Apparently they keep it under control by cutting it back every year.

Grasses weren't a Dutch thing. Despite the apparently unbreakable link between Piet Oudolf and grasses, they were actually introduced by the German Karl Foerster in the 1950s. Leo said there were many 'false starts' involving too many cultivars which weren't good enough, Miscanthus sinensis 'Silberfeder' being a notable exception.

Ecologists and gardeners don't like each other. Even in Holland. Purist ecologists tend to be rather sneering about planting such as the wonderful-sounding grass-and-perennials landscaping in the Amstelween suburb just outside Schiphol Airport - another one on my list for the Grand Garden Tour of Holland I can just feel bubbling up inside - saying things like 'this isn't nature, this is gardening'. Fortunately Leo has come up with an apt phrase capturing the essence of this kind of gardening: 'intensified nature'.

The Dutch refer to plants as 'native' if they've been there since 1900. Whereas the English tend to be talking about anything post-Ice Age. Which is right, I wonder?

There was more: much more. You can listen to the whole thing via the podcast, which I hope will soon turn up on the Gardens Illustrated page: enjoy.

A tale of two designers

Sadly, my college course has now finished - I shall miss it, not just for the chance to jaw about plants for a whole day each week but also because I actually learnt a lot that may be of some use to me if anyone is ever foolish enough to let me loose on their garden.

As a finale, we spent the last day of the course visiting Bury Court, a fine garden not far from here, just over the border between Surrey and Hampshire. The interesting thing about it is that it was designed by two of the leading designers of our time: Christopher Bradley-Hole and Piet Oudolf. The result is a garden of two halves: the "front", an ultra-modern grid around a rather funky wooden building with holes in the sides (a sort of cross between a summerhouse and a pergola), and the "back" a sweeping curve of herbaceous border and sumptuous planting. You can probably guess already who designed which bit.

Here's the front garden: the grid system leads you around the garden and since all the plants are around head-height it invites you to wander into one of the paths off the main drag and get very pleasantly sidetracked.

Grasses predominate, but big hefty ones -there were loads of Miscanthus. All the plants, too, were the kinds that grow really, really tall: the plume poppies (Macleaya cordata) were looking particularly fine.

Though this bit of the garden mainly relied on foliage contrasts for effect, there were splashes of colour: daisies, kniphofia, and here from a little yellow eremurus (they were all over the place in this garden, as it's very dry, and they looked absolutely gorgeous: note to self - acquire as many foxtail lilies as possible next year). But on the whole, restrained and elegant rather then exuberant.

This was more typical, and very effective against that weathered old barn behind. In full flower, these are I believe Calamagrostis x acutiflora 'Karl Foerster', and though I'm not usually keen on monocultural planting this was stunning.

Ooh... more eremurus... luvverly...

Now, this is the back garden. Guess who had a hand in this planting.

In classic Piet Oudolf style there's some bold structural backdrop to it all: these yew hedges curved sinuously among the planting, crooking themselves around the flowers in a protective embrace and, of course, giving them something to show off against.

As always with this consummate plantsman you find lots of plants you'd never come across before but which shoot right to the top of your gotta-have-it-gotta-have-it list. Here a wonderful eryngium of softest pewter blue, the younger flowers still freshly green: it also had the softest texture despite the prickly appearance. I have no idea what kind it is: this is not a garden that has plant labels, so I shall just have to go on one of those quests that lasts most of a lifetime and has you going into nurseries saying, "I'm looking for this sea holly I once saw...."
And here's another one: this fabulous thistle-like plant was at head height yet those flowers were covered in the most curious scales: here's a closeup:

Kind of papery, like a wasp's nest. It just made you want to touch it.

I could go on for hours with pictures of individual plants as there were just so many. Here's another mouthwateringly-lovely scabious: don't tell anyone but a few of the seeds happened to fall into my purse (from a very non-perfect seed head, I hasten to assure you) so you never know, I might be able to persuade it to like my little patch at home.

It's blindingly obvious by now, no doubt, which half I responded to most enthusiastically: but as an exercise in compare-and-contrast it was a real education. Bury Court is a wedding venue (wish I'd known about it when I was getting hitched) though I think you can arrange to see the gardens by appointment. There are a few more photos on the website: but if you can possibly wangle a visit, do go and see it for yourself.