Hummelo: A Journey Through a Plantsman's Life,New

Product DescriptionPiet Oudolf's personal account of his celebrated career in the context of the evolution of his own garden.An intimate look at the personal garden of the Dutch landscape designer renowned for his plantings at the High Line in New York City, and Lurie Garden at Chicagos Millennium Park.Hummelo near the village of the same name in Gelderland in the eastern Netherlands is visited by thousands of gardeners seeking inspiration each year. It is Piet Oudolfs home, his personal garden laboratory, a former nursery run by his wife Anja, and the place where he first tested new designs and created the new varieties of perennials that are now widely available.A followup to Oudolfs successful Landscapes in Landscapes Hummelo tells the story of how the garden has evolved over the past three decades since Oudolf, Anja, and their two young sons moved onto the property, with its loamy sand and derelict, wood stoveheated farmhouse, in 1982.Text by noted garden author and longtime personal friend Noel Kingsbury places Hummelo in context within gardening history, from The Netherlands counterculture and nascent green movement of the 1960s, to prairie restoration in the American Midwest, and shows how its development has mirrored that of Oudolfs own outstanding career and unique naturalistic aesthetic.Oudolf has long been at the forefront of the Dutch Wave and New Perennial Style movements in garden design, which have ecological considerations at their base. His work stresses a deep knowledge of plants, eschewing shortlived annuals in favor of perennials that can be appreciated for both structure and blooms in every season. He is credited for leading the way to todays focus on sustainability in garden design.The book will appeal to readers who favor beautiful, biodiverse, and everchanging plantings: seed heads, grasses, sedges, and winter silhouettes. They will be drawn into its pages by lush photography, often demonstrating how Oudolf views his own work, and providing rare glimpses into his daily life.Short essays highlight important techniques, including scatter plants and matrix planting, and introduce other famed landscape designers Karl Foerster, Henk Gerritsen, Rob Leopold, Ernst Pagels, and Mien Ruys to create a full panorama of the movement Oudolf now leads.ReviewA Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year An updated version of the original . . . reflects important new commissions and directions for Oudolf. The Washington PostEven if you already have the original of this book, you'll want to consider this new, expanded paperback version that includes 13 recent projects shown here for the first time, along with Piet Oudolf's new strategies for design and plant selection. . . . With 350 photographs, the book is an encyclopedia of Oudolf's planting style and his philosophy of looking to the natural world for inspiration. Garden Design OnlineTo mark his 70th birthday, Piet Oudolf, the Dutch prince of a new, highly artistic style of planting, produced a handsome, lavishly photographed book, Hummelo: A Journey Through a Plantsmans Life, a gift to all serious lovers of garden design. His farmhouse in Hummelo, a village in the eastern Netherlands, was the modest beginning of a nursery that eventually drew customers from around the world. Written by his frequent collaborator, Noel Kingsbury they also worked together on the indispensable Planting: A New Perspective Hummelo isnt a biography, but it does explain how the man who devised New York Citys Battery and High Line gardens and Chicagos Lurie Garden did 'so much to raise the profile of landscape designers as a group.' It also sketches a fascinating history of modern Dutch gardening, largely unknown in the United States. If we truly want to heal the land, this important work is a model. And, in their adventurous, arresting, multilayered density, Oudolfs compositions are stunningly beautiful. The New York Times Book ReviewWrit