![]() …. and retail customers were busy buying the plants that the Oudolfs raised to use in Piet’s designs. ![]() ![]() Anja still ran the nursery then, Kwekerij Oudolf with its goddess Flora…. The Oudolfs were generous in greeting us. Later on this trip, we would visit the botanical garden at Leiden and Ecolonia in Alphen aan den Rijn, below, an experimental housing development whose architecture, landscape, utilities and infrastructure had been built earlier that decade using principles of ecological design. Scotland-born Michael had been a student of Ian McHarg ( Design With Nature) at Edinburgh’s College of Art and later at the University of Pennsylvania, before founding the University of Toronto’s Undergraduate program in Landscape Architecture, then moving to York University to teach in their fledgling Environmental Studies program and publish his own book, Cities and Natural Process. ![]() When we visited Hummelo, I had just finished an in-depth magazine profile on Michael Hough, a seminal member of the mid-20 th century ecological landscape movement. Given my childhood love of wild places, I was always more interested in designers who embraced a naturalist ethos and synthesized that into their work, whether purely aesthetic or ecology-based. I had read his books and followed his burgeoning design career with interest. ![]() It was early April 1999, and we were visiting Hummelo in the Netherlands so I could talk with Piet Oudolf and see his garden. ![]()
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