Piet Oudolf, a towering Dutchman with a shock of white hair and the bronzed, weathered face of a man whose workday is spent under the wide-open sky, stepped back to study the prairie stem rising up from the meadow that is Millennium Park’s Lurie Garden.
It’s an eye-catching silhouette, this giant of horticulture homed in on one little amsonia, that sky-blue star that bursts from its straight-back stem. It’s as if you are watching a painter step back from the canvas, making sure that dab of blue is just as he wants it.
It has been seven summers since that blue and the rest of the Lurie’s palette first unfurled, but Oudolf is, above all, a plantsman for all seasons.
“What you put down is a performance in time,” Oudolf explains of his never-waning attention to the ticking of time in a garden. “It’s not like a painting that once you’ve put it on a canvas, it never changes.”
The Lurie is a wild place where butterflies flit and robins drop down to pluck for a worm, all amid the urban grid the stainless-steel Betty-Boop-eyelash curls of Frank Gehry’s band shell peeking over the hedge, and the steel-and-glass needles poking the clouds as Chicago’s architectural icons rise in the distance.
Don’t be fooled by the unfettered feel of the Lurie, as if this prairie erupted all on its own. Every last native and non-native plant willowleaf blue star, nodding onion, bowman’s boot and blazing star, queen of the prairie and wild quinine are just the start of the table of contents, some 200 species in all was plotted and penciled and tucked there by the impressionist plantsman (whose name, by the way, is pronounced “Peet OW-dolf”).
He keeps close watch on his composition, what he
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