Five Seasons: The Gardens of Piet Oudolf 2019

Five Seasons: The Gardens of Piet Oudolf Key Cuttings

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presents

Five Seasons: The Gardens of Piet Oudolf directed by Thomas Piper Five Seasons: The Gardens of Piet Oudolf is an immersion in the life and work of the most influential landscape designer of the last 50 years. Oudolf is responsible for New York’s High Line and many other iconic urban spaces. Closer home, Piet designed the landscaping for the entire site at Hauser & Wirth, Somerset. He is in great demand for his revolutionary ideas of what gardens and public spaces can be, and the impact they can have. More than just a movie for gardeners, Five Seasons changes the way all of us think about and ultimately see beauty itself.

The UK Premiere of Five Season took place at Picturehouse Central, London on 13 June and was released nationwide from 14 June. tpr media consultants ran a media campaign from March to June 2019 which aimed to generate coverage in the specialist media where Piet Oudolf is undeniably the rock star of landscape gardening as well as the broader national media. The film was extremely well­received by critics receiving four stars in The Times and the Guardian. We achieved coverage across the following types of outlets:

• National newspapers and online • National film reviews and film websites • Long lead gardening magazines • Design and architecture outlets • Radio and specialist podcasts • Regional coverage

Below are some of the key cuttings.

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National newspapers and online Financial Times ‘How to Spend it’ magazine

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Financial Times feature in the paper and online

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Piet Oudolf: the man who planted the High Line | Financial Times

Piet Oudolf

Piet Oudolf: the man who planted the High Line Designer’s landscapes with muted colour and form owe much to the Dutch still-life tradition

New York’s High Line © Iwan Baan

Lisa FreedmanJUNE 14, 2019

Landscape designer Piet Oudolf, 74, best known for his transformation of an abandoned New York railroad into the High Line linear park, says that discovering the definition of beauty has become a life-long endeavour. “I try to find beauty in things that on first sight are not beautiful.”

Garden design is an ephemeral art, not commonly classified as fine. But a recent documentary — Five Seasons: The Gardens of Piet Oudolf — argues that the Dutch designer transcends the genre. “He doesn’t claim to be an artist,” says director Thomas Piper, “but others recognise that quality in him.”

One person who does is Iwan Wirth, president and co-founder of the Hauser & Wirth art gallery, who commissioned Oudolf to create a garden from the meadow surrounding the gallery’s outpost in Somerset. Thousands of herbaceous perennial varieties were used in the informal 1.5 acre garden, Oudolf Field, and the Dutch designer’s drawings were hung in the launch exhibition. “Oudolf is always open: that’s what makes him an artist,” says Wirth. “Contemporary art is about people who step over a line.”

Oudolf’s practice has gained a cult following through a movement called the New Perennial. The principle is to use perennials, with an emphasis on diaphanous grasses, in tight, undulating plantings as they would appear in the wild. Many are self-seeding, so not only will a garden appear at its best all year round, but for many years.

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Piet Oudolf: the man who planted the High Line | Financial Times

Piet Oudolf © Alamy

Other major works include Chicago’s Lurie Garden, the RHS Gardens at Wisley and installations at the Venice Biennale and the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion in London. His contribution has been recognised in the Netherlands’ highest cultural honour, the Prince Bernhard Culture Fund Prize, and with the RHS’s first “Horticultural Hero” award.

Oudolf only discovered his calling in his mid-twenties when he landed a temporary job in a garden centre. “I always wanted to be creative, but didn’t know in what way. After six months I was seriously interested.”

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Piet Oudolf: the man who planted the High Line | Financial Times

‘Summer Beds with Piet Oudolf’ at Hampton Court Palace flower show (2018) © RHS/Georgi Mabee

He then trained for four years before launching a career as a landscape architect. The purchase in 1982 of Hummelo, a smallholding in eastern Holland, allowed him to develop an encyclopedic knowledge of plants. He travelled throughout Europe with his wife Anja, collecting specimens for the nursery.

In the 1980s, many of the plants that now characterise his work were largely neglected. “We brought in a range of grasses to give a wilder look. I was moving away from the decorative to be more spontaneous, but I didn’t yet know how to express it.” Henk Gerritsen, a painter and plantsman, helped break the impasse. “Henk pointed me to plants that were not only good when flowering, but were beautiful when out of flower.”

Borders at RHS Wisley © RHS/Jerry Harpur

This led Oudolf to his approach in which a garden becomes a year-round experience rather than a seasonal burst. It projects an idealised vision of an untamed world: “the type of landscape you https://www.ft.com/content/39475642-86e8-11e9-b861-54ee436f9768

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Piet Oudolf: the man who planted the High Line | Financial Times

dream of,” says Oudolf, “but never find.”

Oudolf’s oeuvre is distinguished by its architectural structure, mastery of colour, texture and effect. “Plants are characters I compose with: I put them on a stage and let them perform.”

Piper’s film documents Oudolf’s creative process, from his small-scale sketches, worked in an almost pointillist felt tip, to larger plans where plants are orchestrated to project a mood. “When I have 50 or 60 names, I think of a hierarchy and calculate the numbers.” It is a needlepoint task. At the Hauser & Wirth Gallery, 26,000 plants were used.

Oudolf Field at Hauser & Wirth, Somerset © Jason Ingram

Though Oudolf has worked extensively in the countryside, his most transformative projects have been in cities. “There’s a different audience in the city — the longing for plants is higher. You’re teaching, confronting, surprising much more than in the countryside.”

Manhattan’s High Line, a 1.45-mile length of disused railway track, is widely admired and much mimicked. Oudolf’s brief was to evoke its dereliction: his success was in capturing a naturalistic sense of woodland, prairie and meadow in a forbidding urban context. This linear adventure became the catalyst for urban regeneration, attracting leading architects from across the world and transforming its surroundings into one of the densest areas of luxury residential development in the world. “In 2004, there was nothing around it,” says Oudolf. “After that, the buildings came.”

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Piet Oudolf: the man who planted the High Line | Financial Times

Oudolf’ s garden in Hummelo © Piet Oudolf

His work is considered a happy meeting point between ecology and design. Over the course of his career, he has named more than 70 new plants and his schemes, distinguished by their durability, use plants that are drought-tolerant and insect-friendly. “If a plant also attracts insects, butterflies and birds, it’s truly an ideal plant,” he says.

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Its impact has been widespread, with local parks and dull roundabouts, once characterised by their sterile seasonal bedding, reanimated in Oudolf’s wake with grasses and perennials.

Admirers say his aesthetic lies within the Dutch still-life tradition. The palette is complex yet muted — ochres, violets, crimsons fading seasonally to russet, mahogany and, wintry black. His themes classical: life, death, renewal. (“What we do in our full lifespan happens in a garden in one year. I think

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that works on your soul.”) His appreciation of shadow (“It’s hard to make a garden that looks good even if the light is bad. I think that’s what I am for, getting things right for bad moments.”), scale and line are all painterly. But his work is not quite “still”: “When I put down a garden it’s a performance in time.”

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Piet Oudolf: the man who planted the High Line | Financial Times

drawing of a plan

By choice, he works largely with public gardens: “Every time I do a private job, I think, ‘This is beautiful and great, but who’s going to see it?’ My only interest is sharing my work with lots of people.” For him, “plants are a medium to bring out a very strong emotion”.

Oudolf in Hummelo with family (1984)

As Piper sees it, that’s what set him apart: “People respond to his work in an emotional way. It’s the experience of being transfixed, and not getting why.”

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‘Five Seasons: The Gardens of Piet Oudolf’ is in cinemas now.

For more details visit fiveseasonsmovie.com/screenings

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Sunday Times feature interview with Piet Oudolf

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The Telegraph online gallery of pictures www.telegraph.co.uk/gardening/gardening­events/five­seasons­gardens­piet­ oudolf­pictures/

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Five Seasons was included in the pre­Chelsea Flower Show gardening news round­up in the Telegraph

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National film reviews and film websites

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Total Film

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A SEASON IN FRANCE OUT 14 JUNE

EATING ANIMALS OUT 7 JUNE If the phrase “fecal marinades” sounds grim, be ready. Pools of putrid piggy waste provide a fraction of the yuck factor in Christopher Quinn’s doc, based on Jonathan Safran Foer’s meat industry exposé. Natalie Portman’s portentous voiceover aside, Quinn mounts a heartfelt, historically acute and horrifying account of factory farming’s rise and fallout. It isn’t just meat that’s murder on animals, and on farmers’ ways of life: milk may never look the same again. Even if Eating Animals can’t quite resolve all its wide-ranging questions, Quinn slaps its contentions on the table with fat-free force and focus. Kevin Harley

DIVISION 19 OUT 21 JUNE By 2039, anonymity has been outlawed, the populace chipped

by Big Government. Prisons have been turned into reality TV shows and a band of parkour-loving anarchists (including brothers played by Jamie Draven and Will Rothhaar) seek to bring down the system. It’s safe to say director S.A. Halewood has some big ideas, but despite some smart satire and impressive world-building, the resulting dystopian vision never delivers on the set-up.

Hamstrung by a duff script, incoherent editing and some nonsensical set-pieces, Halewood’s lo-fi indie gets lost in its own post-apocalyptic wilderness. Tim Coleman

This sombre drama from Chadian writer/director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun focusses on Abbas (Eriq Ebouaney), a widowed teacher who has fled the civil war in the Central African Republic with his young children, and who waits in France for a decision on his asylum application. Haroun’s quietly moving feature unfolds in cramped apartments, institutional offices and grey suburbs. While Abbas’ limbo-like existence impacts on his relationship with a colleague (an impressive Sandrine Bonnaire), Haroun shows the erosion of his dignity by a faceless bureaucratic system. Tom Dawson

THE ADVENTURES OF PRISCILLA, QUEEN OF THE DESERT OUT 7 JUNE A quarter-century on from its surprising success, Stephan Elliott’s camp-tastic tale of two drag queens (Hugo Weaving, Guy Pearce) and a trans woman (Terence Stamp) taking a road trip is now looking its age. Yet it’s hard to question its relevance as an LGBTQ+ landmark, one that put Aussie cinema on the map (it scooped the Oscar and Bafta for Best Costume Design). Between the inch-thick slap and kneedeep sentiment, though, it’s perhaps inevitable that any nuance is jettisoned. Neil Smith

FIVE SEASONS: THE GARDENS OF PIET OUDOLF OUT 14 JUNE “I put plants on stage,” says famous landscape designer Piet Oudolf in this meditative doc, “and let them perform.”

Responsible for such spaces as New York’s High Line, Oudolf is followed by director Thomas Piper for 12 months as he designs a 7,000 square metre art garden.

In the meantime, he shares the thoughts and philosophy behind his life’s work. Finding beauty in wild and even dead plants, Oudolf eschews traditional flowerbeds while serenely reflecting on man’s connection with nature – and on how a garden’s lifecycle is much like our own. Tim Coleman

PROPHECY OUT 14 JUNE Starting with a blank canvas, acclaimed Scottish artist Peter Howson creates the titular apocalyptic masterpiece in Charlie Paul’s riveting documentary. Drawing inspiration from mythology, religion and the old masters, Howson describes his process as “controlled insanity”, the madness in his method being equal parts transcendent and terrifying. True, Prophecy is ostensibly 80 minutes of watching him work. But as layers of oil paint accrue, the film builds, too, with a richly textured sound design and an orchestral score that swells to rapturous crescendos, emerging as both a reflection on the creative process and a work of art in itself. Tim Coleman

JUNE 2019 | TOTAL FILM

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Woman’s Own

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Long lead gardening magazines Garden News

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Pro­landscaper – Behind the scenes feature

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Gardener’s World – hosted a screening at the Regent Street Cinema on 18 June and ran a competition online 49.5K followers on Twitter

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The Garden

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Gardens Illustrated

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Garden Design Journal – news story – distributed to the Society of Garden designers

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A Little Bird (blog) – 8782k Twitter4/06/19 http://a­littlebird.com/2019/06/04/five­seasons­the­gardens­of­piet­oudolf/

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The Best of Film in ‘Things to Do in Summer’ round­up https://www.anothermag.com/design­living/11746/june­to­do­list­cindy­sherman­ get­up­stand­up­now­london­2019

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Radio and specialist podcasts Robert Elms Show, BBC London ­ interview with Thomas Piper (23/05/19)

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The Sod Show podcast – Peter Donegan, has interviewed Thomas for the popular podcast www.sodshow.com/2019/05/18/thomas­piper­piet­oudolf­movie­five­seasons/

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Epic Gardening podcast – interview with Thomas Piper – 6 episodes wc 1/06/19 ­ link to episode 1: epicgardening.libsyn.com/piet­s­bio

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Regional

Irish Times

Five Seasons: The Gardens of Piet Oudolf – Impossible not to admire ‘rock star designer’ Review: Patient documentary offers insight into influential Dutchman but feels overdone Tara Brady

Dutch garden designer Piet Oudolf

Film Title: Five Seasons: The Gardens of Piet Oudolf Director: Thomas Piper Starring: Piet Oudolf Genre: Documentary Running Time: 74 min Fri, Jun 21, 2019, 05:00 First published:Fri, Jun 21, 2019, 05:00

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when he oversaw the transformation of the High Line – a derelict elevated railway in New York – into a “park in the sky� and again in 2017 when he designed Hauser & Wirth’s prairie garden in Somerset, England. Film-maker Thomas Piper gets insight into Oudolf’s creative process in Five Seasons: The Gardens of Piet Oudolf.

The subject’s drawings are fascinating things, crowded with differently coloured, imperfect circles: “I’ve always found your drawings sexy�, says one curator, implausibly.

Oudolf’s aesthetic preferences, a kind of planned randomness, factors in how a plant browns and decays in his overall designs: beleaguered winter stalks have a stark beauty of their own. “For me, garden design isn’t just about plants, it is about emotion, atmosphere, a sense of contemplation.� says Oudolf. “You try to move people with what you do. You look at this, and it goes deeper than what you see. It reminds you of something in the genes – nature, or the longing for nature.�

The gardens provide a tranquil, contemplative space that should appeal to lovers of such patient documentaries as Le quattro volte and The Great Silence or the folks that queue up first for Bloom. David Thor Jonsson and Charles Gansa’s score is suitably contemplative.

Beyond the swaying plant life, this autumn-to-autumn chronicle of Oudolf’s craft can bring to mind Frank Zappa’s phrase “dancing about architecture�.

I’m not sure I needed to see the “rock star garden designer� buying cheese at the supermarket deli or eating hunks of ugly meat in America but it’s impossible not to admire this custodian of the wild: “I put plants onstage,� Oudolf says. “And I let them perform.�

Six of the best films to see in cinemas this weekend

y, ,g , FIVE SEASONS: THE GARDENS OF PIET OUDOLF Directed by Thomas Piper. Featuring Piet Oudolf

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Irish Examiner

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Twitter https://twitter.com/wendyide/status/1140167982930386945

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