DryStoneGarden

In Europe I saw a new Piet Oudolf garden. It’s at a newish design museum, Vandalorum, outside a small town in Sweden. It’s great. The garden is pretty much the showcase of the museum — I only know about the museum because of it — and it was unquestionably the highlight for me. ‘Artistic museum planting’ has become quite a niche for Oudolf, he must have done close to a dozen at this point, and I don’t know of any other landscape designer or architect who has done anything like that. I’ve seen a half dozen gardens by him at this point and they’re always worth the effort to see. Really glad my route took me past this one.

The garden is beautiful, a lovely meadow in front of several big red sheds designed by Renzo Piano to look like barns. It’s a signature Oudolf planting. Blocks of perennials and grasses in large planting beds, between gently curved pathways. A lot of familiar plants, some new ones for me. The museum sells a poster of the planting plan, a cleaned up version of a working drawing. I love the quirky design graphics, they have a nice abstract quality but also feel like a peek inside his personal language.

It would be a lovely garden in any context but it particularly suits the area. When a field is left fallow in Sweden, it tends to fill with a waist-high carpet of wildflowers. This is a heightened version of that.

A lot is made of Oudolf liking seedheads, and in this garden he gets some nice effects with them. The Geranium above looks fine though it’s past its bloom. The seedhead below looks great against the golden grass.

On the Astilbe above, the seedhead color is a repetition of the tawny grasses. And the Phlomis below has a nice pink petal, but its the yellow seedhead that shows against the Aster beside it.

The front meadow was planted two years ago and was beautiful to see, but there’s a newer planting in the back, planted three or four months before I visited, that was actually more of a revelation to me. I was shocked by the close spacing of the plants; everything was planted one foot on center. 8,000 plants in what seemed to be about 8000 square feet of planting space, the density of a container planting blown up to landscape scale. Maybe I should have known. There’s an amazing density of flowers in the front meadow, so it stands to reason there must be an amazing density of plants.

Helenium ‘Rubinkuppel’ in the front and in the back.

Aster ‘Erfullung’.

Moonshine Yarrow is never planted this close in the Bay Area.

Stachys ‘Mrs. Magenta’ in the photo above, which will soon do what Stachys ‘Hummelo’ is doing in the photo below. ‘Mrs. Magenta’ is an Oudolf cultivar from a California native, Stachys chamissonis, though I don’t know if it’s actually bred from our seed stock. It’s not often planted here, it likes water and can spread aggressively. I would have been scared to let it loose in Sweden, but it seemed to be behaving. A good little message from Sweden telling me to widen my palette of native plants.

Many good messages. A lovely garden, I’m glad I got a chance to see it.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 9th, 2025 at 8:43 am and is filed under public gardens. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.