I do a design and then, for the production, I rely on other firms.” I don’t want to join the big circuits, not even the creative ones. “I still have a great thirst for freedom, which I only find in creating art on my own. “An office, staff, the social media – all this doesn’t interest me,” he said when we met at the Vitra Haus for the presentation of the garden he designed at the request of Rolf Fehlbaum. He started gardening (as a boy, after falling in love with plants while working one summer in a garden center), and ever since he has designed on his farm, looking after the thousands of species that he grows in his nursery with his wife Anja at Hummelo, a small village not far from the German border. Yet Piet Oudolf does not have a large office, myriads of staff or a smart social media strategy.

The world’s most famous landscape designer (he designed the gardens of Battery Park and the High Line in New York, the garden of the Serpentine Gallery in London and the Lurie Garden at Millennium Park in Chicago), he is the inventor of an approach to gardening that is now copied practically everywhere. When he is drawing, nothing matters except the plants and him. And one need only watch this extraordinary documentary to realize how intimate, thoughtful and almost spiritual is every gesture that this Dutch giant, 78 years old and with a shock of white hair above his face, lavishes on his plants. The Gardens of Piet Oudolf, presented in Italy at the Milano Design Film Festival 2017. The portrait of him at work is by Thomas Piper, who shot Five Seasons. Watching Piet Oudolf designing his gardens has an ancestral feeling about it: the sound of felt-tip pens tracing circles, lines and blocks of color on thick paper the pauses, the details almost engraved with a rapidograph.

Landscape piet oudolf