The Toronto Botanical Gardens: Piet Oudolf's Entry Garden Walk

Piet Oudolf has done many high profile projects all over the world, but one that you may not have heard much about is the Toronto Botanical Garden.  That’s not really surprising since it’s a tiny project for Oudolf.  But for me, it’s a garden close to my former Toronto home and therefore close to my heart, and I have greatly enjoyed following its development since Oudolf was first commissioned for the job around 2005. In collaboration with local firm Martin Wade Landscape Architects, he managed to transform an utterly nondescript piece of land (I can’t even remember what it looked like before), to a fresh and complex garden.

The Piet Oudolf Entry Garden Walk at the Toronto Botanical Gardens, in January 2013.

First, I should explain something about the Toronto Botanical Garden, or TBG. You see, it’s not yet what you might think of as a botanical garden.  To date, the physical gardens cover only a few acres, and are actually only the entry gardens from the parking lot to the TBG building.  The TBG grew out of the Civic Garden Center, which was where the gardening community of north Toronto got together and hosted flower shows, garden club meetings and friendly educational events.  One day, an enthusiastic committee decided that it was time to get more serious and launched the Toronto Botanical Garden initiative.  They campaigned and raised funds, renovated the building, established a strong educational programme, and commissioned the entrance garden.  But the entrance garden is only a small start.  The TBG also sits at the head of Edward Gardens, a large former estate park that follows one of Toronto’s many creeks south through the city.  There is a lot of land available here, and if the TBG is ever to become a true botanical garden, this is the place it will have to grow into. But for now, we have an entrance garden, a Piet Oudolf one nonetheless!  



The garden showing its full glory in early fall 2012.

Martin Wade Landscape Architects were the main drivers of this project, and were responsible for the general layout and several of the individual gardens.  Oudolf’s contribution was the Entry Garden Walk, a long narrow walkway squished between the parking lot, the road, and the main building.  This garden consists of two fairly wide borders that flank a long straight path, with some small lateral shifts worked in for interest. Oudolf really had his work cut out for him in trying to achieve a satisfying and complex garden in this very exposed and narrow space. The plantings are done in his typical flowing prairie style, as one might expect, and were designed around the same time as the Lurie Garden in Chicago and Battery Park in New York.  

 

The narrow borders of the Entry Garden Walk.

The plant palette is recognizably Oudolf and suits the site and climate very well. It’s an open sunny site, and Toronto has hot dry summers and cold snowy winters.   Grasses like Deschampsia cespitosa (Tufted hair grass), several varieties of Panicum and Pennisetum,  and perennials like Echinacea (both white and dark wine colours), Perovskia (Russian sage),  Knautia macedonica, different lobelias, salvias, asters and many others are right at home here.  Although small, it’s a garden I have learned so much from.  Every time I visit, I notice a new and wonderful plant, which I must immediately add to my parents’ garden.  Some pleasant discoveries have included Calamintha nepeta ssp. nepeta,  which requires absolutely no care and always looks great, and Limonium latifolium (Sea lavender), with gorgeous, delicate sprays of flowers over much of summer.  But although I have used many of his plant selections as inspiration, I have not been able to copy Oudolf’s incredible sense of design.  Proof of this is that every time I go to the TBG with my parents, they stop to admire all sorts of plants and ask if we can’t add them to the garden. When I have to tell them they’re already there, I realize they just haven’t noticed them because they don’t look as good.  They might be growing as well, but they just don’t shine in the same way.

The garden in summer (early August), fall (early October) and winter (early January).



The Oudolf garden at the TBG has evolved a lot over time. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to find older pictures to show the garden soon after installation, and all the pictures here are from 2012, six years after the garden was planted. You’ll just have to take my word for it that the composition has become much more intertwined and complex as the years have gone by.  Reading the TBG website, I have also learned that the maintenance of the garden included absolutely no deadheading for the first 3 years in order to allow plants to self-seed and form a “sophisticated meadow”.  Now the plants are selectively deadheaded or weeded.

 

The evolving sophistication of the garden.  Plants are interweaving on all possible planes.

Oudolf has also added some unexpected elements to his design, in partnership with Martin Wade. For example, against one glass wall there are three espaliered crabapples, Malus ‘Donald Wyman’, which are planted at an angle.  While this may be a common technique in Europe, it’s not something often seen on this side of the pond, and for a long time the TBG got a flood of comments about when the trees would finally be straightened out. 

 

The angled Malus trees planted against an etched glass fence are most noticeable in the winter.  In the summer, they form one layer of greenery together with the rich underplantings and a row of paperbark maples, Acer griseum.

At the entrance to the building, there are also several boldly shaped hedges of mixed Fagus sylvatica (European beech), Fagus sylvatica forma purpurea (Purple beech) and Cornas mas (Cornelian cherry) grown within large metal frames. A very neat concept, which immediately added structure to the entrance area before the hedges were grown.


Decideous hedges grown within wire frames make a dramatic entrance to the TBG building in all seasons.

Well, that is just Oudolf’s part of the garden, and it’s taken me a lot longer to describe than I thought for such a small garden.  I’ll get to the rest of the TBG entrance gardens in the next blog – although small, they are home to some bold new design approaches and interesting plantings. 

"Where is the garden?"

A few weeks ago (actually, I now realize that it was a few months ago... ), I was reading Thomas Rainer's series of posts on his blog Grounded Design on the use of native plants, and the related story of the native gardens at New York Botanical Gardens. It seems that the NYBG is currently transforming these areas because they failed to impress visitors. The originals were designed to illustrate various native habitats, but their small size made them difficult to maintain, and in the end the “general public was left wondering exactly where the ‘garden’ was”. In response, the gardens are now being transformed into new designed landscapes with bolder plants and a more refined design, which should hopefully prove more popular. Rainer goes on to say that if native plants are to be successfully adopted into mainstream gardening, they must meet our criteria for “ornamentally beautiful” plants, meaning that they should be “pretty” and “showy”. The public isn’t going to fall for a patch of rough grass with a handful of hidden orchids. Also, we should be using these plants in “designed landscapes”, rather than confining them to designs that usually try to mimic some natural habitat. And that got me thinking… are we just trying to change the varieties of plants we use, or are we trying to change the types of gardens we create?

First, I should say that I fully understand the problem Rainer describes. Maybe it’s fair to say that the average person enjoys bright colours and “knock-your-socks-off bloomy” borders much more than something they could encounter on the side of the road. We are attracted to flowers and colours, so perhaps we should just acknowledge this as a universal starting principle in all design. I also agree that just because we’re trying to use more native plants doesn’t mean we should always try to mimic a certain habitat.

But at the same time, I can’t help feeling that there should be more to this than just trying to find sufficiently dramatic native plants. We seem to be on a bit of a movement for more ecologically sensitive gardening. Maybe this movement could be about more than just exchanging one colourful plant for another; maybe we can change our whole perception of what a garden is?

This brings to mind two rather well known garden makers: Piet Oudolf, the internationally recognized guru, and Henk Gerritsen, the lesser-known wild child. Oudolf has become a huge influence in the landscaping world by using new plants in new ways. He has helped change our perceptions of gardens, and I, like so many others, admire and enjoy Oudolf’s work a lot. At the same time, I would argue that he is still playing by the rules of the game. People don’t wonder if Oudolf’s gardens are gardens – they clearly are, but they are new and different. His strength is that he has found a balance between managing our desires for an aesthetically organized and fairly colourful and ‘showy’ garden, while still pushing the envelope.




Henk Gerritsen was a colleague of Oudolf’s, and they collaborated and shared ideas on many new concepts. However, Gerritsen’s garden ideas were far more wild and pushed the concept of a garden further than Oudolf. I’m by no means an expert on his philosophy (especially as I haven’t even read his book -can’t find a reasonably priced copy anywhere!), but I have been to his garden. When I was there, my first impression was that it was a bit too disorganized and unkempt in parts, perhaps losing the feeling of a garden. But it had the most incredible atmosphere, and almost 2 years later it’s still one of the places I think back to the most. Flowers were far fewer and smaller, plants seeded everywhere, and the buzz of insects was deafening. It was wild and overwhelming at times, but also gentle and comforting at others. Gerritsen’s approach is far messier and less structured than Oudolf’s, and I’m sure many visitors to his garden have been left wondering ‘where the garden is’. But in the end, for me at least, this kind of ‘borderline’ garden provided a richer experience than many other gardens I have been to, one of being truly immersed in an outdoor, green space.



Human perceptions of beauty can change, often dramatically, over time. Gardens are no different. Although we’ve been trained for showy flowers and ‘designed landscapes’, we’ve already started to appreciate new types of gardens. Maybe we can push this even further, and come to appreciate all sorts of experiments as gardens - even those with – rumpled textures, subdued flowers and a little bit of chaos just beyond our control.

Wisley Garden, England

The RHS garden Wisley is supposed to be the jewel in the RHS’ crown. It’s certainly a fantastic garden, which has almost anything one might be interested in as a gardener. Unfortunately for me, Wisley came at the end of our spring trip to England and I have to admit that I was a little bit gardened out. I really didn’t think this would ever be possible, but apparently five large gardens and an even larger garden show are just about enough for one trip. And maybe, although it seems sacrilege to even suggest it, I also grew tired of the absolute perfection of each garden we visited. Forests and wild meadows never seem to lose their charms – could it be that English gardens, or any type of garden for that matter, are just too ‘landscaped’ for their own good? Or maybe I’m just reading way too much into this – seeing multiple castles or paintings can also wear you down, no matter how beautiful each is individually.

But I digress. Back to Wisley, which really is a very lovely garden. It’s the oldest garden owned by the RHS, which means the Society has had over 100 years to develop it into one of the top attractions in England. The well-known greenhouse is instantly recognizable, while the Wisley trial fields are the sacred ground where the “RHS Award of Merit” is determined. There is great history at Wisley, a true establishment of English gardening culture.


As the gardens are very large, I’ll just go through a few of my favourite sections. One of the latest notable additions to the garden is Piet Oudolf’s modern take on the English double border. His wide borders run from the aforementioned signature greenhouse up a large slope, to the upper part of the gardens. While in late May they clearly weren’t at their full glory, they were still nicely filled in. I did think that perhaps some more structure (which is often found in Oudolf’s work) would have made the composition stronger, but maybe late spring is not the best time to judge.



A completely different area was the alpine garden. Here, attention was focused on the individual plants, and late spring was a great time to visit. As one might expect, everything was grown to perfection - a real candy store for the alpine plant enthusiast.



As seems to be often the case, I also really enjoyed the woodland section. There were two woodland sections at Wisley, one a little more ‘gardened’ with smaller trees and a great concentration of lovely woodland floor plants, and another which was more forest-like, at the further end of the garden. The latter featured some amazing rare and old tree specimens, as well as an impressive collection of rhododendrons and azaleas, all in bloom. A beautiful garden to enjoy, even in the perennial English drizzle.