Hummelo: A Journey Through a Plantsman's Life (THE MONACELLI P)

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About Hummelo: A Journey Through A Plantsman's Life

Product Description An intimate look at the personal garden of the Dutch landscape designer renowned for his plantings at the High Line in New York City, and Lurie Garden at Chicago’s Millennium Park. Hummelo—near the village of the same name in Gelderland in the eastern Netherlands—is visited by thousands of gardeners seeking inspiration each year. It is Piet Oudolf’s home, his personal garden laboratory, a former nursery run by his wife Anja, and the place where he first tested new designs and created the new varieties of perennials that are now widely available. A follow-up to Oudolf’s successful Landscapes in Landscapes— Hummelo tells the story of how the garden has evolved over the past three decades since Oudolf, Anja, and their two young sons moved onto the property, with its loamy sand and derelict, wood stove-heated farmhouse, in 1982. Text by noted garden author and longtime personal friend Noel Kingsbury places Hummelo in context within gardening history, from The Netherlands’ counterculture and nascent green movement of the 1960s, to prairie restoration in the American Midwest, and shows how its development has mirrored that of Oudolf’s own outstanding career and unique naturalistic aesthetic. Oudolf has long been at the forefront of the Dutch Wave and New Perennial Style movements in garden design, which have ecological considerations at their base. His work stresses a deep knowledge of plants, eschewing short-lived annuals in favor of perennials that can be appreciated for both structure and blooms in every season. He is credited for leading the way to today’s focus on sustainability in garden design. The book will appeal to readers who favor beautiful, biodiverse, and ever-changing plantings: seed heads, grasses, sedges, and winter silhouettes. They will be drawn into its pages by lush photography, often demonstrating how Oudolf views his own work, and providing rare glimpses into his daily life. Short essays highlight important techniques, including scatter plants and matrix planting, and introduce other famed landscape designers—Karl Foerster, Henk Gerritsen, Rob Leopold, Ernst Pagels, and Mien Ruys—to create a full panorama of the movement Oudolf now leads. Review A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year “An updated version of the original . . . reflects important new commissions and directions for Oudolf.” —The Washington Post “Even if you already have the original of this book, you'll want to consider this new, expanded paperback version that includes 13 recent projects shown here for the first time, along with Piet Oudolf's new strategies for design and plant selection. . . . With 350 photographs, the book is an encyclopedia of Oudolf's planting style and his philosophy of looking to the natural world for inspiration.” —Garden Design Online “To mark his 70th birthday, Piet Oudolf, the Dutch prince of a new, highly artistic style of planting, produced a handsome, lavishly photographed book, Hummelo: A Journey Through a Plantsman’s Life, a gift to all serious lovers of garden design. His farmhouse in Hummelo, a village in the eastern Netherlands, was the modest beginning of a nursery that eventually drew customers from around the world. Written by his frequent collaborator, Noel Kingsbury—they also worked together on the indispensable Planting: A New Perspective— Hummelo isn’t a biography, but it does explain how the man who devised New York City’s Battery and High Line gardens and Chicago’s Lurie Garden did 'so much to raise the profile of landscape designers as a group.' It also sketches a fascinating history of modern Dutch gardening, largely unknown in the United States. If we truly want to heal the land, this important work is a model. And, in their adventurous, arresting, multilayered density, Oudolf’s compositions are stunningly beautiful.”  —The New York Times Book Review “Written to commemorate Piet Oudolf’s 70th birthday, Hummelo: A Journey Through a Plantsman’s Life recounts his