Fall, Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall: Five Seasons with Piet Oudolf

On October 2, the Architecture & Design Film Festival in New York will screen a film about Dutch landscape architect Piet Oudolf. “Fall, Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall: Five Seasons with Piet Oudolf“ is a film by the American filmmaker Tom Piper, Director of Production for Checkerboard Films.

About the Film

This immersive documentary gives viewers a rare and poetic look at the creative process of this revolutionary figure, including intimate discussions across all fours seasons in his own private garden, and on visits to his signature public works in New York, Chicago, and the Netherlands, as well as to the far-flung locations that inspire his genius, including desert wildflowers in West Texas and post-industrial forests in Pennsylvania. Threaded throughout the film, Oudolf designs, installs and then opens a major new garden at Hauser & Wirth Somerset, a work Piet himself calls his best yet. This immersive documentary gives viewers a rare and poetic look at the creative process of this revolutionary figure, including intimate discussions across all fours seasons in his own private garden, and on visits to his signature public works in New York, Chicago, and the Netherlands, as well as to the far-flung locations that inspire his genius, including desert wildflowers in West Texas and post-industrial forests in Pennsylvania. Threaded throughout the film, Oudolf designs, installs and then opens a major new garden at Hauser & Wirth Somerset, a work Piet himself calls his best yet

About Piet oudolf 

Piet Oudolf has become the “living embodiment of the New Perennials’ landscape movement.” The New Perennials philosophy, rooted in a reverence for ”wild nature,” is made real through plant designs which feature ”architectural plants chosen for their form and structure rather than their colour.”Oudolf’s work includes the The High Line, the New York  City park which transformed abandoned rail road tracks into an lush elevated green space.On the plant design for the High Line, he said: “It’s far more daring than anything I’ve done previously. I had to deal with a limited soil ecology right in the centre of a hard urban environment, and design it for people who might never have ever really left the city environment.”

The landscape designer uses his own three-acre garden to continually “investigate” the life cycle of perennials. ”Here in vignette are all the thinking, formal devices, shrubs and flowers he uses, in the greatest traditions of landscape, to act as a metaphor for human birth, life and death.” Oudolf was quoted as saying: ”I like to connect people with the processes of their own lives. What it takes humans a lifetime to experience, a plant will experience in its own yearly life cycle. In that sense, gardening is a microcosm of life.”

His other permanent projects can be found throughout The Netherlands, England, Ireland, Germany, and Sweden, and he has created temporary installations for the Venice Biennale (2010) and the Serpentine Gallery pavilion (2011) as well. He was awarded the highest cultural honor in The Netherlands, the Prince Bernhard Culture prize, in 2013 and was declared an honorary fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 2012. This volume presents how his career and the garden and former nursery run by his wife Anja in Hummelo, The Netherlands.