Piet Oudolf is the 74-year-old Dutch landscape gardener who made his name by designing New York’s High Line project in 2006, in which a derelict viaduct section of the railroad in the west of Manhattan, abandoned since 1980, was repurposed as a brilliant rus in urbe adventure: an overhead urban quasi-wilderness that became one of the city’s biggest attractions.
Oudolf is an intriguing figure, a gardener who prizes not flowers or decorative features or even colour but the muscularforms and textures of plants and grasses. His gardens are so fascinating that they almost assume the status of abstract art (although this is not an idea closely examined in this documentary) and they could be described as site-specific installations where the garden itself is the site. He also designed the Battery Gardens in New York and the Lurie Garden in Chicago, as well as various projects in Europe – although my one tiny quarrel with this film is that there is nothing about his Millennium Garden in Norfolk’s Pensthorpe Nature Reserve, once the home of BBC’s Springwatch.
“Plants are characters I compose with and I put them on the stage,” he says at one stage, and at another: “There are too many flowers. I long for their decay, when they turn to skeletons.” There is something almost Uncle Monty-ish about Oudolf at times, despising mere floral beauty.