Piet Oudolf: Naturalistic Planting and Its Principles

Piet Oudolf is the Dutch garden designer most closely associated with naturalistic planting: drifts of perennials and grasses composed for structure, texture and change across the year rather than for a short burst of flowers. His work on New York’s High Line, Chicago’s Lurie Garden and the gardens at Hauser & Wirth Somerset has changed how landscape architects, city authorities and private gardeners think about planting in public and private space.

This article sets out who he is, how his approach developed, the principles that make his planting recognisable, and what those principles mean for designers working in a tropical city such as Singapore, where the plant palette and the seasons are entirely different. It also looks at one aspect often overlooked: many of his best-known schemes sit on structures, and the planting depends on engineering that the visitor never sees.

Who Piet Oudolf is

Oudolf was born in Haarlem in the Netherlands in 1944. He came to plants relatively late, after early working years outside horticulture, and in the 1980s he and his wife Anja established a garden and a specialist perennial nursery at Hummelo, in the eastern Dutch province of Gelderland. The Hummelo garden, begun in 1982, became both a laboratory and a showcase. Plants were grown, observed and selected for qualities that conventional nurseries rarely valued: strong stems that stand through the year, attractive seedheads, good form after flowering and the ability to sit comfortably beside other plants without constant intervention.

Through the 1990s and 2000s that experimentation fed a series of influential books, several written with the horticultural writer Noel Kingsbury, including Designing with Plants (1999), Planting Design: Gardens in Time and Space (2005) and Planting: A New Perspective (2013). He also collaborated with the Dutch designer Henk Gerritsen on books about plants for the natural garden. His work is often placed within a broader movement, sometimes called the New Perennial movement, that drew on ecology as much as on the traditions of the herbaceous border.

The principles of Oudolf’s planting

Several ideas recur across his gardens and writing:

Structure before colour. Plants are chosen first for their form: spires, umbels, buttons, plumes, screens and mounds. Flower colour matters, but it is the shapes and their repetition that hold a composition together.
The whole life of a plant. A planting is designed to look good as it emerges, as it flowers and as it dies back. Seedheads and dry stems are left standing through autumn and winter rather than cut down, so the garden has a second life in its skeletons.
Repetition and rhythm. Key plants recur through a scheme, giving coherence across a large area, while scattered individuals add the spontaneity associated with wild vegetation.
Layering and matrix planting. In later work especially, a background matrix of grasses or low perennials is threaded with taller, more dramatic plants, imitating the way plants intermingle in natural meadows and prairies.
Long-lived, resilient plants. The aim is a community of plants that can persist with relatively modest maintenance, managed by editing rather than replanting each season.

Oudolf’s planting plans are distinctive in their own right: hand-drawn sheets with symbols and colours for each plant, more like musical scores than conventional technical drawings, and they record the logic of a scheme as clearly as any plan.

The High Line and other landmark projects

The project that made Oudolf widely known outside gardening circles is the High Line in New York, a disused elevated freight railway on Manhattan’s West Side converted into a public park. The design team was led by the landscape architects James Corner Field Operations with the architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and Oudolf designed the planting. The first section opened in 2009. His planting took its cue from the self-sown vegetation that had colonised the abandoned tracks, translating that wildness into a designed, maintainable composition.

Other key works include the Lurie Garden in Chicago’s Millennium Park, designed in the early 2000s with the landscape architects Gustafson Guthrie Nichol; planting at The Battery in lower Manhattan; gardens at Scampston Hall in Yorkshire; the Oudolf Field at Hauser & Wirth Somerset in Bruton; and Vlinderhof, a public garden in Leidsche Rijn near Utrecht. In 2011 he worked with the architect Peter Zumthor on the planted courtyard of the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion in London, a reminder that his planting sits comfortably alongside rigorous contemporary architecture.

Planting on structures: what the visitor does not see

From an engineering standpoint, several of these celebrated gardens are effectively green roofs. The High Line’s planting sits on a steel viaduct; the Lurie Garden sits over a structure covering rail lines and parking. Planting of this kind is constrained by what the structure below can carry. Saturated growing medium is heavy, mature planting adds load, and the build-up must include drainage, a protection layer and a waterproofing system that can be maintained for decades.

The appeal of perennial and grass planting on such structures is partly that it can perform well in relatively shallow, free-draining substrates compared with large trees, which need far greater soil volumes. That is a design choice as much as an aesthetic one. Anyone considering naturalistic planting on a podium, roof or terrace should treat the planting plan and the structural design as one exercise, as discussed in our articles on green roof design and rooftop gardens. The loads, falls, outlets and access for maintenance need to be agreed before the first plant is chosen.

Translating Piet Oudolf’s ideas to the tropics

Oudolf’s palette is drawn largely from temperate perennials and grasses, many of which would struggle in Singapore’s heat and humidity. His dramatic winter skeletons depend on frost and a dormant season that the equatorial climate does not have. Copying a temperate Oudolf scheme plant for plant would not work here.

The principles, however, travel well. A tropical designer can still choose plants first for structure, repeat a limited number of key species for coherence, build a matrix of groundcovers and grasses threaded with taller emergent plants, and design for change over time rather than for a single moment. In the tropics, change comes less from seasons and more from flowering cycles, growth rates and the contrast between dry spells and monsoon rains. Native and regional plants, sedges, gingers, ferns and tropical grasses offer a rich vocabulary of form.

The main adjustments are practical. Growth is fast and continuous, so maintenance is more frequent, and editing must keep vigorous species from swamping slower ones. Drainage must cope with intense rainfall. On roofs and podiums, wind exposure and heat from surrounding surfaces affect plant choice. These considerations connect naturalistic planting to Singapore’s wider interest in biophilic design and to the city’s tradition of green roofs and vertical greenery.

Why his influence matters for architecture

For architects, the significance of Piet Oudolf lies in how he reframed planting as a design discipline with its own rigour, comparable to the composition of a building. His gardens are not decoration applied after the architecture is finished; they are spatial, temporal and structural compositions in their own right. That attitude encourages earlier collaboration between architects, landscape architects and engineers, and it challenges the habit of treating planting as a contingency sum at the end of a project.

It also changed public expectations. Planting that looks loose, seasonal and wild, once seen as untidy, is now widely appreciated in city parks and on corporate rooftops. That shift opens room for planting that supports biodiversity and needs fewer inputs, provided it is designed and maintained with knowledge rather than left to chance.

Frequently asked questions

What is Piet Oudolf best known for?

He is best known for naturalistic perennial and grass planting designed around plant structure and seasonal change, and for the planting of New York’s High Line. Other well-known works include the Lurie Garden in Chicago, the Oudolf Field at Hauser & Wirth Somerset and his own garden at Hummelo in the Netherlands.

What is matrix planting?

Matrix planting uses a continuous base layer of grasses or low perennials, through which taller and more striking plants are scattered or repeated. It imitates the way plants mix in natural meadows, covers the ground well, and tends to need less intervention than planting in separate blocks.

Can an Oudolf-style garden work in Singapore?

The temperate plant palette generally does not suit Singapore’s climate, and there is no winter dormancy. The design principles do transfer: choosing plants for structure, repeating key species, layering a matrix with emergent plants and designing for change. A tropical scheme needs a tropical plant list and more frequent editing because growth is continuous.

Is naturalistic planting suitable for a roof garden?

It can be, because many perennials and grasses grow well in relatively shallow, free-draining substrates. The structure must be designed for the saturated weight of the growing medium and planting, and the waterproofing, drainage and maintenance access must be planned together. A structural engineer should confirm the load capacity before planting begins.

Which books by Piet Oudolf are most useful for designers?

The books written with Noel Kingsbury, particularly Planting Design: Gardens in Time and Space and Planting: A New Perspective, explain his approach to plant selection, combination and long-term behaviour. They are written for temperate climates, but the method of thinking applies widely.

Planning planting on a roof, podium or terrace and need the structure, loads and waterproofing assessed? Talk to our consultancy or get in touch.