Apart from yew and box, which are used as clipped accents, shrubs are rare Perennials are his paints These he often repeats, but never to the point of boredom. I suspect that at first we were all looking for different things and that each of us in turn found what we wanted - enough atmosphere and sense of place to satisfy me. A variety of plants (some of which none of us had seen before) to occupy Beth who trained at Kew, and for Kirsty, the artist, some extraordinary shapes and textures. Later, as we toured the garden with Oudolf we began to appreciate his highly organised and far from naturalistic approach.He believes in using a restricted palette of plants: each border is conceived as a whole. The first impression was of many solid shapes of yew, stock still, between fountains of grasses that never stopped erupting.
Because it was late in the year, colours were subdued: there was a lot of brown from seed heads but dots of red kept the garden from looking too dead. When we arrived we found billows of high farm hedges surrounding a rectangle of garden in front of a gabled brick house with white shutters. New naturalistic gardeners praise his use of grasses, the scale of his planting and the range of perennials that he has personally selected. It sounded as though a trip to Piet's own garden was a must, because it would highlight the influences filtering through to modern English gardens. The weather helped. On a golden autumn afternoon, three of us set off on bicycles from the village of Hummelo near Arnhem. Five kilometres of pedalling on flat traffic-free tracks with the sun on your back would put anyone in a good mood for garden visiting.
Piet Oudolf, a Dutch nurseryman and designer, has been the talk of the pros for the last year or so. My tip: take Grandpa and order Roederer Cristal 1989 (pounds 82.95). If he's old enough, you'll get the magnum for the cost of a couple of bottles of house red. I'd never dream, of course, that you'd order Cristal on Grandpa's discount and Delamotte NV (pounds 19.95) when you're paying full price.... THE WINDS of change are blowing over the nation's favourite pastime.
Young designers have had it with Sissinghurst, Hidcote or Rosemary Verey's Barnsley. They like abstract lines better than formal ones, prefer grasses to flowers, and tend to base what they do on large-scale natural effects, rather than on highly cultivated traditional layouts. The modern tendency to island beds the size of small continents fills me with gloom, especially when they contain a very few low care plants, and whispering grasses. I had to go to Holland to discover that New Gardening can be an inspiration, and that grasses may not be as impossible to manage as I thought they were.