Book Review: Hummelo, by Piet Oudolf and Noel Kingsbury
Chicago’s Lurie Garden and New York City’s High Line are two of the most popular gardens in North America, yet they would be barely recognizable as “gardens” just three decades ago.
Piet Oudolf, a designer for both those gardens, is one of the pivotal figures in this shift.
He is not a landscape architect but a Dutch plant breeder and garden designer who brought a fresh eye to what makes a plant garden-worthy. This book is named after the plant nursery and home where he grew many of the perennials he introduced or promoted.
Hummelo follows his career from small scale garden designer to international acclaim.
The style that Oudolf is associated with is difficult to define or even name. Many call it the New Perennial Style, which Kingsbury describes as “looser, more romantic, and above all more natural”. It is a style that has “ecological considerations at its base.”
(A side note: despite the book’s cover, Hummelo is clearly about Oudolf but by Kingsbury. The two have collaborated with each other for many years. If Kingsbury has no problem with this then I don’t either, as Kingsbury is a good writer and Oudolf reportedly is not.)
Oudolf is the first to acknowledge that while his gardens look natural they are in fact man-made artifices – what he calls “enhanced nature”. He emphasizes the use of plants that show “resilience and longevity” – plants that are able to thrive with less labor and water and little to nothing in the way of fertilizer and pesticides.
His designs emphasize more about plant shapes – “spires, buttons, globes, plumes, structure and filler plants”, as well as “the play of light, movement, harmony, and control” – and less about color.
This is in contrast to traditional perennial gardening, which Kingsbury says “has largely been about growing a relatively small number of high-intensity ‘flower-power’ plants”.
While Oudolf may deprecate color, his designs are not above giving the people what the want, as with the “River of Salvia”. These are gorgeous drifts of Salvia first tried in a Swedish public park and then replicated in Chicago’s Lurie Garden.
I enjoyed Kingsbury’s account of Oudolf’s early professional life, how his ideas were shaped by Dutch wildflower parks, the landscape architect Mien Ruys, and the German plant breeder Karl Foerster. Oudolf’s ideas also developed in the context of “back-to-the-land” and environmental movements – though Oudolf himself is decidedly not a hippie.
Also interesting and helpful are discussions of the evolution of Oudolf’s planting style, which is both eclectic and continually evolving. This has included planting in blocks, intermingling, and “matrix planting” in which ornamental perennials emerge from matrices of low-growing grasses such as Prairie Dropseed (Sporobulus heterolepis).
It is a mark of his influence that Oudolf recently closed his nursery in part because so many others had started to grow plants that he had grown at Hummelo because they were so hard to obtain.
Throughout all of this, a portrait emerges of Oudolf as someone who is blunt and unpretentious, happy to exchange ideas, experimental and highly creative. These qualities shaped his success but also make his work difficult to define. As one of his assistants says: “His style is intuitive … as soon as you think you understand something he comes up with something new.”
gardeninacity 
We were lucky enough to have Kingsbury as a guest speaker at a Hardy Plant Society of Oregon program. It made clear the thought and effort required to achieve such results.
I have never seen Kingsbury speak but Oudolf spoke at an event at the Lurie Garden last year.
Great review of a great book…
Thanks!
Thank you for the review. I have it sitting on my to read pile…I find his style beautiful to look at but would love to see how he deals with smaller spaces.
He has done private gardens but none of them really meet my definition of smaller. But I do think it is possible to adapt some of his approach to small gardens. However, I wouldn’t try too hard to implement his approach in my own garden. For example, I like to mix annuals in with my perennials.
That river of salvia is a beautiful thing.
One of my absolute favorites.
Fascinating Jason…..I’m off to New York in September for a week to see my nephew so shall CERTAINLY see the High Line, I’m really looking forward to that!xxx
You will love it! And there is so much more to enjoy in New York!
Sounds like an excellent book. Thanks, Jason.
You’re welcome!
This review makes me want to read the book, something I hadn’t wanted to do previously. The publisher should be giving you kudos, if not reductions in price!
Please tell them that! I actually bought this book and did not get a free review copy.
This is really interesting. I explored the Highline one very hot summer day and loved it. I wish it had been there back in the day when I lived there. It’s great that cities are doing more of this.
There is more of it happening in Europe, especially in Germany. We just opened a new park in Chicago on an abandoned rail line.
I think the nursery closed partly because people just wanted an Oudolf plant and his wife (who always ran the nursery) just couldn’t keep up with demand. I doubt in the end it was worth the hard work. I was lucky enough to visit Hummelo some years ago, and met Oudolf.
I’m glad you mentioned Anja his wife. The book gives her a lot of credit for the nursery and for what Piet Oudolf was able to accomplish.
Great review.
Thanks!
I’m a huge fan of Oudolf and look forward to reading this book, so thanks for your review Jason. PS I love those Lurie Garden photos – fabulous planting.
Lurie is one of my favorites, By the way, the book includes a list of public gardens designed by Oudolf in both Europe and North America.
I need to get over to the Lurie Garden one of these days. We’re always so busy with family events when we’re in the area, so I just need to make time. Thanks for the review and the information!
I definitely recommend that you make the time if you can. June is the month to see the River of Salvia.
I really enjoyed this review. Noel Kingsbury is such an interesting man. He came here for lunch a couple of years ago when he was talking at our garden club and even the Pianist, a non- gardener found him interesting and entertaining. I visited his garden in Herefordshire in June and was fascinated by what he is doing there. Some of the garden visitors were complaining that it was not a ‘ real garden’ because it challenged their ideas of what a garden looks like. Noel is constantly experimenting with plants and plant combinations growing in a naturalistic way so that the garden merges seamlessly into the countryside. I loved it.
I think that experimental approach and the emphasis on a naturalistic look are things he shares with Oudolf. I think both of them have played a big role in redefining what is meant as a garden.
Thank you for the review. I appreciate both men and think they’ve contributed a lot to the garden scene bringing along a badly needed change…but then again, I can’t help feel a little tired when I see yet another book about Oudolf. Do you feel this book tells you something really new?
For me it did, but I can imagine for others who are do landscaping professionally it may not. The parts about the roots of this kind of garden design and how it gradually came together as a powerful trend at the end of the 20th century was new to me. The parts about the design approaches were not really new, but helped me gain a better understanding. I’m one of those people who has to read something about ten times in order to get it.
A nice review Jason. Oudolf had come to my university years back. He is very inspiring and I very much like his combination of plants and place.
I agree that he is inspiring. I don’t agree with everything he says such as his rejection of annuals and mixed borders. But I love the gardens he creates and the fact that he is always willing to experiment.
Good review of this book and rather interesting to read some of the comments. Piet is so influential and I am especially a fan of his work that has been done in collaboration with Tom Stuart-Smith.
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