Oudolf, now in his early seventies, began creating gardens in the 1970s and, frustrated at the difficulty of acquiring enough plant material for his work, started a nursery to grow the plants he needed to meet his own demand. “It all begins with Mien” says Piet Oudolf of the influence Mien Ruys has had on contemporary planting design. After meeting Jekyll in England, she studied at the Bauhaus in Germany before embarking on a lifetime of experimentation with perennials, mixing the naturalism of Robinson, the painterly qualities of Jekyll and the clean lines she had learnt from Modernism to create something that was not only original but has also proved to be a continuing inspiration for designers today. Mien’s interest however lay not in producing plants but in using them.

Here, her father experimented with propagating new forms of perennial plants, making these available to the wider public as demand increased through the writings of Robinson and Jekyll. These ideas proved to be highly influential to a young Dutchwoman, Wilhelmina (Mien) Ruys, who was raised at the famous Moorheim nursery in Dedemsvaart. His friend, Gertrude Jekyll, shared his ideas and added colour theories learnt from the Impressionist painters in her acquaintance.

The English origins of the naturalistic planting movement flourished in the form of the Victorian plantsman William Robinson whose book, the Wild Garden, is still in print 135 years after first being published. Oudolf, inspired by Mien’s earlier work, has become the most significant and acclaimed landscape designer working within this genre, and visits to several of his designed public spaces are a major feature of this tour. Two significant Netherlanders have been at the heart of this movement Mien Ruys and Piet Oudolf. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the Netherlands has been at the forefront of a new direction in planting design, in which a more naturalistic approach to planting, using perennials and ornamental grasses and known as The Dutch Wave (and latterly the New Perennial Movement), has quietly been gathering momentum.

Piet oudolf landscapes