Vitra Oudolf Garden / Piet Oudolf

The planting activity for a new garden by the Dutch designer Piet Oudolf started in May 2020 on the Vitra Campus in Weil am Rhein. It will take some patience for the landscaping to reach full bloom, but in just a few months visitors will be able to enjoy initial glimpses of the artfully composed wilderness. The 75-year-old Dutchman is regarded as a pioneer for a generation of garden designers who in the late 1980s began to question conventional practices, finding traditional landscape gardening too decorative, labor-intensive and resource-consuming. Instead, they turned to perennial, often self-regenerating plants, shrubs, grasses, bushes and wildflowers, which had been long ignored as garden plants, and favored an equally unconventional layout of the plantings.