GCA Medalist in the News

August 25, 2020

Piet Oudolf Receives Beatrix Farrand Achievement Award

Dutch landscape designer Piet Oudolf, the 2019 GCA Medal of Honor winner for outstanding service to horticulture, has received the 2020 Achievement Award from The Beatrix Farrand Society (BFS). Renowned in the United States for the High Line plantings and the Battery Park Memorial Gardens in New York, the Lurie Garden in Chicago, the Meadow Garden at the Delaware Botanic Garden, the Oudolf Garden Detroit on Belle Isle, and many others, Piet Oudolf has inspired international audiences with his use of herbaceous perennials and grasses to achieve year-round interest and beauty. 

The Beatrix Farrand Achievement Award is given annually “to honor a living person whose life's work, exhibiting the qualities of talent, vision, and commitment, has consistently and significantly contributed to humanity and to the environment through the art of landscape architecture, design, or the natural sciences.” 

The Garden Club of America recognized Oudolf with the Medal of Honor in May 2019 for his “revolutionary genius, designing gardens that paint nature with vivid compositions, where visitors enjoy the beauty of plants in all seasons.” He was featured on PBS NewsHour in April 2019  How Landscape Designer Piet Oudolf Captures Nature’s ‘Emotion’ and with a follow-up virtual visit in 2020 The Solace of Gardening. 

Oudolf noted in a 2008 New York Times article that his garden designs do not try to replicate nature but rather recreate the “feeling of plants in nature.” His year-round gardens celebrate the dried, monochromatic forms that define nature’s beauty in the fall and winter as well as the spring and summer gardens ablaze with color. To view some of the perennial plants that Piet and Anja, his wife, have tested and recommend, go to FuturePlants.com.

The Beatrix Farrand Society Achievement Award to Piet Oudolf

 

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