The silent heroes of garden design
What WW2, Margaret Thatcher, and the US prairie all have to do with garden style.
The beginning of grasses: WW2
In 1949, former German soldier and recently-released British POW, plantsman Ernst Pagels returned to his home in Germany. Suffering from depression, he reached out to his former mentor and renowned horticulturist Karl Foerster, who provided him with — among other encouragement — perhaps the most cognitive therapy of all: plant seeds. Particularly, seeds for a then-unknown hardy indigo-flowering sage, Salvia nemorosa. Given the means and motivation, Pagels soon began his own plant nursery and over time became one of the foremost plant breeders of his generation, known for his work developing cultivars of Miscanthus sinensis, the above-mentioned salvia, among others.
Miscanthus sinensis is a type of ornamental grass with a rare combination of grace and stature. Forming large, upright clumps between 4–8 feet tall, its finely-textured blades soften its size, and in muted light give the plant a sparkling glamour. In the fall it produces feathery plumes in shades of cream and copper, with a softness that responds to both human touch or any passing breeze. It is easy to see why a German man, perhaps struggling with his personal and political history, devoted the remainder of his life to coaxing those qualities into winter hardiness and genetic stability.
His work found a receptive audience. As German gardens are more constrained by climate than the English or the Dutch, their plunging winter temperatures make resilient plants as valuable as colorful ones. Rather than particularly floral displays, German gardens achieve complexity through combination of plant forms, or ‘plant communities.’ Miscanthus, with its native northern Chinese winter hardiness and aesthetic appeal, became quite popular, blending with other German native grasses like Calamagrostis, Molinia, and Deschampsia.
Grass goes global: post-Thatcher and the Dutch Wave
In the early 1990s, another plantsman sought refuge from England by way of relocation. Michael King, a self-described ‘Thatcher refugee,’ trained horticulturist, and former senior accountant for the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, moved to Amsterdam to begin a new career as a garden designer. He was eager to discover forward-thinking plant breeders and designers, and soon befriended Piet Oudolf and the group that became known as “The Dutch Wave.”
At that time, Oudolf was becoming known among plant professionals for both the types of plants he was developing at his nursery at Hummelo, and the particular way he was combining them in various public commissions. And King, who had discovered the impacts of ornamental grasses through the pioneering work of James van Sweden and Wolfgang Oehme in the US, encouraged Oudolf to distill his practice into a book. They co-authored the modestly titled ‘Gardening with Grasses’ whose effects were to be more broadly reaching than they initially anticipated.
In terms of its impacts on international landscape design, Wolfgang Oehme’s German status seems almost predestined. Born and trained as a horticulturist in his native country, he relocated to Baltimore in 1957, bringing his plant palette to bear in a city he described as a “horticultural desert.” The naturalistic quality of his work quickly drew the attention of Dutch-American James van Sweden. In 1977 they founded Oehme van Sweden (OvS) to lead the charge against the American preference for lawn in favor of large-statured perennials and grasses. Considering his German heritage, it’s not surprising that Miscanthus varieties were prominently used in their designs, and in the late 1990s and 2000s became widely planted in both public and private gardens throughout the US.
Chicago 2001 + NYC today
Today if you search for Miscanthus at your local nursery, it’s unlikely you will find any for sale. In many parts of the US, it has become invasive in natural habitats and is no longer available at retail nurseries.
If you were to visit the High Line in New York City to view Oudolf’s work, you will not find any Miscanthus planted at all. What you will find is perhaps one of the finest gardens made in recent memory, planted heavily with US native grasses and wildflowers. This change in Piet’s plant palette was a result of his work on the Chicago-based Lurie Garden, and his collaboration with a white-bearded, kind-eyed Wisconsinite with a passion for prairie flowers.
Oudolf was introduced to these species by Roy Diblik, a plantsman operating a retail nursery and landscaping company in Wisconsin, who was tasked with growing the plant material spec’d for the Lurie Garden in 2001. Diblik had read and admired King and Oudolf's book on grasses years prior; perhaps this is what led Diblik to suggest a field trip to Schulenberg Prairie during the construction of the garden. It was late summer, and baptisia — a relatively unknown perennial at that time — was in full bloom. Oudolf, known as a quiet man, was apparently quite affected by what he saw.
If you were to walk through the High Line, knowing none of this history, I’d imagine you would still be captivated by what you would see. That is the miracle of plants: they present themselves and their history fully, but silently. You might notice the effervescent haze of Panicum, and consider that its presence began as a style: first in Germany with a war-veteran, filtered through a Dutch man with a passion for the US prairie, tempered by a midwestern gardener with deep roots in that particular flora. You could consider what a miracle gardens are, how many hours and years of devotion they contain. Or, you could simply register the garden as “beautiful” and continue on. There is something to be said for silent heros.
NYC 2014 (A personal note)
In the late autumn of 2014, having just returned to New York from a good friend’s unexpected funeral, I went on an anguish-fueled jog that ended at Harlem Piers Park. I ran out onto the wood planking and stood over the Hudson, fixing my blurring eyes to the brown cliffs of the New Jersey Palisades.
In a New York way, the Harlem Piers Park is often quiet, mostly populated by sounds of traffic from the Hudson Parkway and water from the Hudson River. It was late afternoon and the relatively new planting of ornamental grasses caught the low light. Two types had been planted: I’m guessing Calamagrostis ‘Karl Foerster’ and Panicum v. ‘Shenandoah.’ One bearing the name of the man who inspired Engel’s enthusiasm for grasses, and the other the preference of Piet Oudolf, a man who wove that enthusiasm into an international style nearly 100 years later.
They had been left according to what is now fashion — fully dormant, straw-like and untouched. At that moment, their tawny presence and implied history offered something difficult to describe. It was not exactly comfort but was, as all great gardens aim to be, both an expression of the natural world and a distraction from it. It was company. And gratefully received. 🌾
Thanks also to Tasha Haley for her help copy editing this post.
