BELLE ISLE VISIONARY
Oudolf to create new garden
Piet Oudolf, a rock star of garden design, was on Belle Isle Thursday musing about creating the greatest of all gardens.
The world-renowned Dutch designer known in America for High Line Park on an elevated rail corridor in New York City and the urban Chicago oasis of Lurie Garden is starting to conceive one of his dynamic gardens in a spot he chose beneath the Carillon Tower on Belle Isle.
The Garden Club of Michigan — which invited him in a “why not Detroit” and a “why not Oudolf” moment — is beyond excited about the garden which will require more than $2.7 million in fundraising.
“For many people he is the rock star garden designer in the world,” said Maura Campbell, former president of the Garden Club of Michigan, who confessed she didn’t know who this “Pete” fellow was at first.
“He has raving fans, groupies if you want, just the most amazing people who are really excited.”
Oudolf spent a day and a half touring Detroit last year before choosing the empty spot on Belle Isle for a 1.5-acre garden in front of the Nancy Brown Peace Carillon and between the Remick Band Shell and the Anna Scripps Whitcomb Conservatory.
“I try to make it the greatest of all gardens, for sure,” he said Thursday without being specific.
The 73-year-old said he was already intrigued by Detroit which is undergoing its own renewal. He hopes visitors will be inspired and excited by his complex garden design with native and non-native plants. His gardens are less about decoration and more about native grasses and perennials in a living work of art.
Oudolf, who started a nursery at his home in the Netherlands in the 1980s before becoming a top designer and part of the New Perennials movement, aims to create a more natural but dynamic look that will interest visitors in all seasons. He wants people to leave feeling like they’ve seen something they’ve never experienced and feeling inspired to think differently about gardening.
“It’s always new,” he said. “If I go out in my own gardens, every day is new.”
The Garden Club of Michigan raised $150,000 for the design. Now it needs to raise the estimated $600,000 cost to install it in 2019 and another $2 million for maintenance.
In the 1880s, what’s now considered the Jewel of Detroit — Belle Isle — was inspired by Frederick Law Olmsted who designed Central Park in New York City. Olmsted’s design for the 982-acre Detroit River island was never fully developed because it was considered too elaborate.
Michele Hodges, president of Belle Isle Conservancy, said it is an honour to have a modern-day Olmsted.
In New York, Oudolf was the plant designer for High Line Park and the waterfront Battery Park.
He was also the designer of Lurie Garden in Millennium Park in Chicago, which Campbell said attracted 20 million visitors with about half saying they took in Lurie Garden. Belle Isle has four million visitors a year and hopes to attract more from both sides of the border.
Campbell can’t put a number on the economic impact in Detroit where Oudolf is willing to design another garden along the waterfront. People heard of Oudolf and wondered if the Ambassador Bridge, if decommissioned, could become a larger version of his High Line design.
“It would be really cool,” Campbell said.