Oudulf Field, Hauser & Wirth
Sometimes, when you long to visit a much lauded garden, it doesn’t quite live up to the hype. Not this one! Actually not so much a garden as a perennial field planted by the king of the new perennial movement, Dutch designer Piet Oudolf.
Having drooled over achingly beautiful photographs of this magical place I am enormously happy to report that it is just as wonderful in the floral flesh, stalk, stem!
I visited in mid July, the sky was brooding, heavy with the threat of a sudden downpour. It was oppressively hot and sultry, the garden was throbbing with summer heat. The planting is textural, layered and the colour is operatic in its flamboyance. The insects were there in multitudes, the chorus hummed, buzzed and clicked the rhythm, the soundtrack to the meadow. The birds, whilst not visible, chirruped and whistled triumphantly too. The whole effect was something akin to suddenly inhaling the most intoxicating, heady perfume and feeling all light headed and flimsy, sort of not there-ish.
Radic pavillion
I feel like Charlie Bucket entering the magical world of Willy Wonka for the first time. It is a surreal experience to emerge from the cool considered cloister of the gallery into this sweeping riot of colour. Your eye is immediately drawn to the futuristically and sensually shaped Radic Pavillion.
Originally designed in 2014 by Chilean architect Smiljan Radić, it was installed as the Serpentine Gallery’s summer pavillion. It was subsequently moved to Hauser & Wirth in 2015. It is used as an event space and sits wonderfully at the top of the slope. I can’t decide, is it pebble like or alien craft? Either way I love it! You can walk around it, under it, into it… I love the hand made feel of the structure once you are inside.
‘The brief was absolute freedom, with no compromise,’ says Piet. ‘He (Iwan Wirth) wanted me to feel free in what I did; I think that is what he wants to do with his artists, too.’ That’s a brief most designers could live with, but what also appealed was that the garden would be included as an integral part of the larger vision of the building complex. ‘It would work by itself, but I think it gets more sense of place when it is set in a wider context. In the gallery, there is beauty everywhere; then you come into the garden, which is part of the whole idea of everything that happens there.’
Last night, as I composed this post in my head, as I walked with the bear, it was much better than this! As I write today it isn’t coming to me as beautifully as I would like, so there we have it. I feel some re-writes will be coming along which I know, the eagle eyed amongst you will spot. In the meantime I hope I have conveyed a soupicon of what it felt like to be there…
It is true, there is beauty everywhere in this place and it is magnificently sensory…