The only option was to produce or breed their own, but it was a wonderful excuse for their trips to United Kingdom and eastern Europe where the Oudolfs developed long lasting relationships with plantspeople like Beth Chatto and Ernest Pagels.

When Piet and Anja began their garden design business, they did not benefit from having nurseries that grew their desired plants. Her outgoing demeanor was an effective foil for Piet's reticent nature. As Piet's work took him overseas, Anja assumed the helm of running the nursery, greeting visitors, and managing the staff and sales. At the same their two young sons had to be brought up.

Purchasing Hummelo in its decrepit state tested the mettle of the Oudolfs - their financial subsistence was for a year, forcing the couple to depend on Anja's cut-flower business for the first few years while Piet renovated the house and built up the nursery. Piet and Anja's relationship, professional and personal, itself is not unusual in the gardening world where couples have kept enterprises afloat creatively and economically. The Dutch talent for land reclamation extends to recreating beautiful gardens and landscapes, and Oudolf is one of the numerous practitioners within that community.īehind each creative individual is another who holds the fort, keeping things organized and in order, and the book makes it clear that Anja Oudolf is integral to the operation. Piet Oudolf is no different from his fellow country people - in temperament he comes across reticent and studious, (having met him and Anja once at the University of Pennsylvania's landscape architecture lecture program a few years ago), but warm and personable in good company. The way Noel Kingsbury and Piet Oudolf have chronicled the people and places makes for a more compelling story than the plants and gardens themselves as they had been in their previous books.īy nature, the Dutch are a pragmatic, stoic lot especially for people who faced the inevitable task of carving out a country below sea level. Despite being marketed as a biography, the book is more an examination of personal influences that shaped Piet Oudolf's career as a plantsman and plant designer. It reads easily at a relaxing pace without the overwrought drily tone typical of biographical genre. Weighing at 2.8 pounds, Oudolf Hummelo is hardly the light paperback one slips into the travel bag. The book's hardcover format is rather unconventional for its subject because gardening books are often lavish coffee table tableau instead what we have in our hands is the size of a hardcover fiction. Four years after the pictorial reference Landscapes in Landscapes (2011), the Monacelli Press recently issued Oudolf Hummelo written in part to commemorate Piet Oudolf's seventieth birthday and place the garden designer himself through a biographical and cultural prism.

Anja oudolf