Hauser & Wirth is a commercial art gallery with branches in Zurich, New York, London, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Gstaad and … Somerset! On the outskirts of the village of Bruton, to be exact, which has probably done quite nicely out of people beating a path to the gallery to see the garden created by renowned Dutch landscaper Piet Oudolf.
When Iwan and Mauela Wirth saw the Oudolf garden at the 2011 Serpentine Pavilion (the pavilion is constructed anew annually in London’s Hyde Park), they decided to commission one of his distinctive prairie-style gardens for their West Country contemporary art gallery.
The site, Durslade Farm, was a collection of 18th century listed buildings that had fallen into disrepair. They hired Luis Laplace, an architect based in Paris, to renovate the entire site with the gardens always to be an integral part of the overall plan.
Gallery director Alice Workman introduced Oudolf to Laplace, collecting the latter from his Paris base and travelling together by train to The Netherlands to Oudolf’s home, “where the relationship was cemented with long conversations over cheese sandwiches — which continued throughout the process”.
Oudolf Field opened in late summer 2014, after England’s wettest winter on record — we visited in August 2018, after one of the hottest summers on record. It was a thrill to find the garden was more or less on our meandering route, especially as the great man closed his private garden to visitors the year before we arrived in The Netherlands, darn. But can you wonder? I’m not sure I’d want busloads of people roaming through my garden, no matter how short the visitor season.
The entry to the Field is through an enclosed ‘cloister’ garden, one not visible from the other. The Field is described as a perennial meadow with Oudolf a famed practitioner of the New Perennial movement. What is the New Perennial movement? The short answer is, it’s about mimicking nature and creating communities within the planting. A longer, and more erudite answer, is here.
With 3,000 square metres of flowerbeds (17 in total), all edged with metal (Coreten steel?, anyway there’s more than 1km of it) that follows the flowing contours, Oudolf had plenty of room to flex his muscles and the result was planting more than 26,000 herbaceous perennials in signature drifts, plus a small pond. Many of the wildflower seeds are gathered locally.
Despite looking pretty good, there had clearly been a few failures in the extended heatwave of 2018. The dense planting, however, gives a look of abundance and there are plenty of airy grasses for movement when the wind blows. Oudolf chooses plants for texture and foliage, he says, before he thinks about flowers and their colour, but there was still plenty to delight the flower-lover’s eye.
This is a garden that changes with the season, especially as many perennials have been chosen for their longevity of flowering, changing the colour palette and points of emphasis as it goes.
I’d love to go back and see it in spring or autumn …
Sandra's Garden 