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Plants that Look Great in Winter

Heather Evans

How to create a gorgeous Piet Oudolf winter garden with native plants

Piet Oudolf’s Floral Labyrinth at Trentham Gardens (source: Trentham)

Dear Avant Gardener, Would you please share the plant names of the Piet Oudolf garden in the first photo? — Curious in PA

Can these be planted in the Northeast? – Catherine

OMG, did that photo hit a chord! Yes, I will name plants in the photo I recently shared, as well as Oudolf’s favorite North American native plants with beautiful winter silhouettes — aka, plants that look good dead. But don’t expect your garden to look like that photo if you plant them. The same garden — the Floral Labyrinth at Trentham Gardens — looks completely different in the bright light of a summer day, shown above. Nice, but ho-hum in comparison to the moody photograph snapped on a frosty winter day, don’t you agree?

The impact of the image I shared previously (see below) is as much about the photographer’s eye as about garden design. The photographer captured the garden in late fall, touched by frost and backlit by early morning or late afternoon sun through fog or haze. That backlighting picks up the feathery texture of the grass and emphasizes the silhouettes of the dense seedheads. The result is a frankly sensuous aesthetic experience.

As for the plants, the key is the mix of long-lasting shapes:

Forget the colors for a moment (or two), get the camera, take some pictures, and then turn them into black-and-white; in fact, on some modern smartphones you can even look at the world around you in black-and-white in real-time. Too many color-packed borders look like … porridge? An Oudolf border will still be clear, and you will have no difficulty making out the individual plants. This is because plants are overwhelmingly chosen on the basis of their having distinctive structure. — Piet Oudolf & Henk Gerritsen

I’m fairly sure the spikes in the left foreground are astilbe (probably Astilbe chinensis) and the feathery grass in the right foreground is Calamagrostis x acutiflora ‘Karl Foerster.’ Both are exotics. You can plant them in the Northeast, though you could add ecological value by substituting goatsbeard (Aruncus dioicus) or Culver’s root (Veronicastrum virginicum) for the astilbe; these natives are also Oudolf favorites and play a similar structural role. The daisy-like shape in the center left is a native echinacea. Several Oudolf favorites can produce the other shapes, so take your pick from the list in "How."

Meanwhile, get out in the garden — or a wild place near you — and soak in the beauty of the stalks and seedheads. Teaching others to see, not planting, is perhaps the truest expression of Oudolf’s genius.

Happy seeing!

— The Avant Gardener

Why, How, Wow!

Why?

Regular readers know by now that I only recommend North American native plants, because restoring biodiversity is my top priority — easily achieved without sacrificing beauty or enjoyment. About half of the plants with beautiful winter silhouettes in Oudolf’s encyclopedia, Planting the Natural Garden (2019) are North American natives.

Oudolf's interest in North American native plants was initially aesthetic, not ecological. He started a nursery in the 1980s to offer perennials not then available, scouring the world to find species for the experience of nature he wanted to create.

'Perennials weren't fashionable at the time,' says Piet. 'I wanted plants that would perform in a similar way to a shrub, but had the advantage of being perennial. Perennials are so much more dynamic, they change with the seasons, die back, come again; there is so much more of an emotional connection with them.' — Piet Oudolf in House and Garden UK​

Oudolf often specifies cultivars. I generally recommend straight species, because cultivation can diminish —or even erase — the value of native plants to the specialist insects that depend on them. Fortunately, Oudolf tends to disdain highly-bred cultivars; for example, regarding echinacea cultivars known for diminished ecological value, he writes, “Recent breeding has also produced some hideous doubles.”

In practice, Oudolf’s naturalistic gardens are enormously biodiverse, each encompassing hundreds of densely planted species. And his palette of North American plants has expanded by working on U.S. projects with growers like Roy Diblik and native plant experts like Rick Darke, Patrick Cullina, and Neill Diboll. Oudolf's gardens are sustainable, too. According to a landscape architect who worked at Oudolf’s Lurie garden in Chicago (with a whopping 220 species!),

Oudolf selects plants for his projects with durability and longevity in mind. His palettes do not contain plants that require constant soil amendment or chemicals to thrive. There is no mulching necessary, other than leaving last season’s plant material in place after the garden is mowed in late winter/early spring with a brush cutter. The small lawn at the south end is weeded by hand and mowed with a manual rotary mower. — Megan Wade

Oudolf colleague Tom de Witte shared this recent example in Belgium of the density and complexity of their plantings.

How

Below are some North American natives from Oudolf’s list of “plants with beautiful winter silhouettes.” I’ve grouped them by shape, with a link to a description and native range. An asterisk (*) indicates only cultivars are specified; for specifics, see Planting the Natural Garden.

To help readers focus on plants native to your regions, I’ve marked them by time zone – P, M, C, and E for Pacific, Mountain, Central, and Eastern. As always, consult your local native plant nursery for appropriate uses or similar local alternatives.

Daisy-like flowers with high cone centers

Round or unusual seedheads

Umbels (umbrella-like clusters)

Clouds of tiny flowers

Feathery or airy

Spiky

Wow!

When one enters Chicago’s Lurie Garden or New York’s High Line, it is clear these are not traditionally cultivated gardens, nor are they prairies, woodlands, or meadows, where composition is left to the whims of natural forces. Rather, they are composed and curated landscapes that evoke a site’s ecological past, celebrate the best attributes of plant life, and invite visitors to slow down, look closely, and ask questions. — Megan Wade

North American native Eastern bee balm (Monarda bradburiana) in flower and after, when its textural, globe-like seedheads turn burgundy and persist into winter (source: Lurie Garden)

Related Resources

  • Missed my article on plants that look good dead? Read it here.

  • Interested in learning more about Oudolf’s favorite plants? Buy his encyclopedia of plants, Planting the Natural Garden.​

  • Curious about Oudolf's own garden in winter? See the pictures in House and Garden.