Courtesy and © Piet OudolfĮqually as fascinating as the photographs of the end result of his projects are the drawings Oudolf uses to plan them. Oudolf's hand-drawn plans for the Vitra campus in Germany. “Oudolf has thus succeeded in emancipating planting design as an art form in its own right, bringing it out of its niche and on to the big stage,” writes fellow gardener Cassian Smith. A photographic anthology of his greatest outdoor work as well as a poetic ode to his creativity (thanks to several essays by his contemporaries), it offers a complete look at Oudolf and his legacy. “That happened when I met plants.”Ī new book Piet Oudolf: At Work, published tomorrow by Phaidon, proves how inarguable his impact is. “I always had a strong feeling that I could do something different,” Oudolf previously said. (Just to name a few.) Currently, most consider him the most famous person in his field. But, hundreds of millions of people have: The Dutch landscape designer is the mastermind behind New York City’s High Line and Battery Park, Chicago’s Lurie Garden in Millennium Park, London’s Queen Elizabeth Park, the entry to Toronto’s Botanical Garden, and the Vitra Campus in Southwest Germany. For the omniscient Oudolf it’s all according to plan.It is probably an exaggeration to say everyone has walked through a Piet Oudolf garden. Native deciduous trees preside over layers of flowering shrubs, grasses, and shade-tolerant ground flora that evolve season to season in pastoral choreography-with dramatic shifts in density, color, texture, and form. Among the featured feats is this never-before-seen private garden in the Netherlands, where he deftly transformed a network of green roofs (their substrate no more than 10 inches) into a blurred boundary between home and terrain. Surveying more than 20 projects, including greatest hits like the High Line and Hauser & Wirth Somerset, the volume juxtaposes detailed photography with the largest collection of his drawings ever published, generously offering a Technicolor road map to his oft-imitated schemes. But there’s some serious method to that madness, as outlined in his revealing new monograph, Piet Oudolf at Work (Phaidon, $80). Over the course of his decades-long career, the Dutch landscape maestro has upended conventions of green space, weaving perennials into seemingly untamed meadows and other horticultural marvels.

Piet Oudolf by Piet Oudolf