Photograph by Dana Gallagher. Produced by Lindsey Taylor.Drifts of perennials, including Agapanthus Donau, line the stone path.

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Thousands of people walk New York’s High Line every day — and for many of them it is not the views they have come to see, or the architecture, or each other, but the plants. The same could be said of Chicago’s Lurie Garden in Millennium Park, where extensive drifts of flowering plants in permanently planted borders constantly draw in passers-by. These are examples of a new kind of urban planting, one with incredible public appeal — it is colorful but somehow also wild looking; there is plenty of seasonal change although the plantings are permanent, and they pull in urban wildlife too. Piet Oudolf, the Dutch designer who is responsible for the planting in both of these public projects, is also much in demand for planting private gardens, like this one in Nantucket, which showcases his horticultural philosophy.

Once upon a time, planting in the city meant beds of brightly colored flowers that lasted for a few months before being dug up, disposed of and replaced with something else. It was all very labor intensive, resource-hungry and unsustainable. Oudolf’s work is part of a movement that seeks to use long-lived, perennial plants, which need minimal management. In some projects, like Millennium Park, his first public commission in the United States, or at Battery Park in New York, volunteers get involved in basic maintenance work, providing an outlet for gardening energies and the desire to be close to nature. The city may have become our habitat, but we are increasingly learning how we can share it with other species — and the new perennial planting is central to how we are doing this.

Oudolf’s career as a garden and landscape designer has mirrored the growth of this new planting movement, of which he has been a pioneer. Born in the Netherlands in 1944, he has worked in garden design for most of his life. The tradition he came from balanced strong shapes, often formed from clipped evergreens, with rich planting. The flowering plants available, though, tended to emphasize color above all else and to be high maintenance. Oudolf found himself increasingly drawn toward plant varieties that kept the proportions and grace of their wild ancestors. In this he was not alone, for a whole generation of gardeners and garden designers in the Netherlands, Germany and Britain was looking at the visual possibilities of using wildflowers and nature-inspired plant combinations. In Germany, a number of publicly financed research bodies were applying plant ecology science to the management of public parks, while in Britain, a growing network of small specialist nurseries was steadily increasing the number of perennial plants in cultivation. Researchers in Britain also began to work on using seed mixtures to create extensive long-lived plantings — as was appreciated by visitors to last summer’s spectacular Olympic Park in London.

Oudolf began to use more and more “unconventional” plants in the gardens he made for clients. He was particularly drawn to plants with strong visual structures like grasses and members of the Queen Anne’s lace family; he once said, only half-jokingly, that “a plant is only worth growing if it looks good when it’s dead” — in other words, plants whose seedheads or winter foliage have strength and character are every bit as valuable as vibrant summer flowers. Finding commercial sources of these plants difficult, in 1982 he set up a small nursery to supply his design work. Run by his wife, Anja, the nursery developed a momentum of its own — soon British gardeners were finding their way across the Dutch countryside to visit and buy plants.

Meanwhile in the United States, a similar process had begun with the work of Oehme van Sweden, who favored romantic drifts of ornamental grasses and blocks of perennial flowers rather than the trees, shrubs and lawn grass look that dominated American landscapes. Elsewhere in the United States, primarily in the upper Midwest, ecologists had begun to promote native wildflowers as an alternative to the conventional lawn. The idea of the garden was becoming steadily wilder.

For large public projects, Oudolf collaborates with landscape architects, so that he can concentrate on the planting. In Chicago, he worked with Gustafson Guthrie Nichol and the set designer Robert Israel on the Lurie Garden: five acres of public garden above a parking garage. Small groups of perennials and grasses, over half of them Midwest natives, are intermingled on gently rolling ground. It is clearly a garden, but looser and less controlled than most of us had seen before. The garden created a huge amount of public interest, with people strolling through and bombarding garden staff with questions.

The New York High Line was a collaboration between Oudolf and the landscape architects James Corner Field Operations (who also did the master plan for the Nantucket garden). Wilder still than the Lurie Garden, the High Line again used a very high proportion of regionally native plants. Oudolf devised a method of precisely planning the distribution of the plants so that it looks almost as if nature had put them there. Wild grasses tend to form a matrix in areas, with flowering perennials interspersed between them. Small trees and shrubs are used in other areas, with an underlayer of the kind of plants that are very similar to those that might be found beneath trees in natural woodlands. For many a city dweller, this is about as close to nature as they will ever get. For urban bees, butterflies and birds, this is nature.

The garden on Nantucket also uses drifts of mostly native American grasses to create the effect of wild grassland, but on a far more expansive scale; visually they tend to complement and even highlight the flowering elements as well as have their own intrinsic beauty — one especially appropriate to the open coastal landscape of the island. The evocation of natural habitats may look carefree and unplanned, but this is the result of many years of research, and the latest stage in a continuing and collaborative journey.

A version of this article appeared in print on 04/14/2013, on page M294 of the NewYork edition with the headline: A Wilder Way.

Want to design the perfect garden? Sustainable West Seattle has the answers

The Sustainable West Seattle April Forum “Successful Gardening with Nature Part 2 – Designing the Perfect Garden” is set for Monday April 15.

The forum will be held on Monday, April 15, at the West Seattle Community Orchard at South Seattle Community College. You’ll find the orchard on the east side of the north parking lot.

Before you start planting a garden, start planning. Successful food gardens are well planned to take advantage of natural features such as sun and shade as well as structural features like walls, concrete and fences. A good plan incorporates not only what you want to grow, but includes the benefits of plant-to-plant interaction, pest control, aesthetics, and ease of gardening.

Where:
West Seattle Community Orchard, South Seattle Community College
When:
6:00 pm Meet and Greet, SWS announcements
6:15 to 6:55 pm – Tour the Orchard with Q A regarding the orchard plan
7:00 to 8:00 pm – Food from local gardens and drink will be served, followed by a power point presentation with local gardens being shown as well as permaculture design principles being presented. The three dimensional garden will also be described.

Whether you’re a seasoned backyard farmer or a newbie contemplating your first tomato plant, join the company of others who want to grow their own food and learn a few tips from successful gardeners.

We encourage our readers to comment. No registration is required. We ask that you keep your comments free of profanity and keep them civil. They are moderated and objectionable comments will be removed.

A simple garden design that he commissioned for his own backyard turned into an award-winning career change for Thomas Wheaton.

Wheaton’s new career began after he and his partner moved to Littleton in 2005. Their backyard was “nothing but grass that became just a big patch of burnt grass in the summer,” Wheaton said. The following year they hired a garden designer to create a perennial border for their backyard. Wheaton, who has a degree in art history and was working as an accountant in Boston at the time, enjoyed the process so much that, when he started thinking about changing careers, he decided to become a garden designer.

In 2011, he enrolled in the Garden Design School USA at Tower Hill Botanic Garden in West Boylston, where he earned a certificate in garden and landscape design.

After graduation, he teamed up with classmate Christine Kendall Quinby, of Natick, and they designed a garden to enter in the Boston Flower Garden Show in March. They won four awards for their design, titled “A Welcoming Urban Oasis.”

“The theme of the show this year was called ‘Seeds of Change’ and they were looking for innovative uses of materials — new kinds of plants that need less water; a very environmental sort of green approach,” he said.

Wheaton said the design had to be contained inside a 400-square-foot plot.

“That was fun because I was given a blank space – a perfect square,” he said.

He put a circle inside the square, accessed by two paths.

“I imagined … a small space somewhere in a dense area like the South End or Beacon Hill with buildings all around it. I imagined a little courtyard and for purposes of the show, I imagined it as a parking space. My imaginary clients had the space they weren’t using and they wanted to put in a garden. So I imagined taking out the asphalt or brick and resurfacing and putting in a garden.”

Wanting to create some interest, he shifted the circle a foot in two directions, to create four slightly different triangular spaces surrounding the circle. The design included a built-in rainwater recovery system that provided irrigation.

The next step was deciding what materials to use in the finished design. Keeping to the theme of the show, he chose porcelain tiles for the pathways because they contained 20 percent recycled material. He used weathered steel for the retaining wall, because it took up less room than rocks or bricks and lent a nice texture to the design.

Selecting the right plants was a little tougher.

“Because we’re in New England,” he said, “we had to have all the plants for the show picked out before the holidays last year. The next step was to find a nursery that could store them in the winter and trick them into blooming early.”

They chose Weston Nurseries in Chelmsford. Once all the materials were gathered and the design was complete, it took a team of eight volunteers two and a half days to build the garden in the showroom, before the start of the show. All in all, Wheaton said, it took them about eight months to plan the garden, and $15,000. But it was worth it, he said, because it generated new clients.

“The exposure I’ve gotten from the show has been incredibly valuable,” he said.

Now he hopes to continue the momentum to build his new business – Thomas Wheaton Garden Design.

He offers a range of services and prices – from initial consultations to design to overseeing the entire project.

First, he meets with the clients on site to take a look at the space and determine their preferences.

“Then I look at ways I can design the space to meet their expectations and make it more useful to them, more beautiful,” he said.

Wheaton says he is a big fan of modern designers, but he tries not to let his personal style influence his designs.

“It starts with listening carefully to what [the clients] want,” he said. “I sometimes have to restrain myself from designing what I want and start thinking like the client.”

“What I’d like to end up doing is working at home on designs for people who want to have their landscape composed in a thoughtful way,” Wheaton said. “And along the way meet some great people and exchange ideas and create some beautiful yard scapes.”

Visit thomaswheatongardendesign.com, email tom@thomaswheatongardendesign.com tom@thomaswheatongardendesign.com or call 508-345-2029.