Perennial Management, The Piet Oudolf Way

This course reveals Piet Oudolf’s revolutionary plantings of The High Line, New York City’s famous landscaped railway line that cuts through the centre of the city. Throughout the course, you will experience unique top down drone footage of The High Line and The Battery Park, so you can see a bird’s eye view of the plantings and their context.

During the videos, you will walk along The High Line discussing and observing the plants, with Piet Oudolf himself who designed the planting, and Dr Noel Kingsbury his long term co-writer. As part of the course, we also hear from Andi Pettis, the acclaimed Director of Horticulture for The High Line who reveals fascinating insights on how they continue to maintain and manage the planting as the site evolves. This is the first course of its kind in the world.

Once the context is set, for understanding the evolution and maintenance of perennial plantings in harsh city environments, Dr Noel Kingsbury takes you through a practical approach of how to plant and maintain this type of landscape design. The second part of the course features the New York Battery Park designed by Oudolf as an earlier work, with Dr Noel Kingsbury Gabriela Marin (Chief Horticulturalist), Director of Horticulture for The Battery.

Finally you will learn the real ‘how tos’ of achieving the types of designs that Piet Oudolf has successfully pioneered in sites like The High Line and The Battery. Dr Noel Kingsbury talks to Helen Picton from Old Court Nurseries near Malvern in the UK, to teach you the practical material relevant to lessons 2 and 3.

As an important part of this unique course, we were privileged to work with both Piet, Noel and the team run so successfully by Andi Pettis at The High Line. To this day, The High Line is able to sustain its beautiful plants, with a team of gardeners, and the entire project is funded by donations. Please join this amazing movement by donating to The High Line to keep this pioneering project alive and to help us spread the word globally.