Piet Oudolf - Gardens of the High Line: Elevating the Nature of Modern Landscapes

Piet Oudolf
Rick Darke

Timber Press

I feel very strongly
in the sort of
planting that I do,
that you feel the
changes all the time.
It is a changing
beauty: from beauty
into beauty.

PIET OUDOLF

Chelsea Grasslands, mid-November.

Heart-leaved aster (Aster cordifolius ), hairy alumroot (Heuchera macrorhiza Autumn Bride), Dales alumroot (Heuchera americana Dales Strain) and wild-oat (Chasmanthium latifolium ) thrive between steel rails and riveted railings at a corner of the Northern Spur in late September.

The idea for a book dedicated to the High Lines gardens originated with co-founder Robert Hammond. Roberts offer to write the introductory chapter and provide the support of Friends of the High Line staff added immense appeal to the project. Others whod played essential roles in making and shaping the High Line also offered to share their knowledge and insights. When our friend and graphic designer Lorraine Ferguson agreed to join us, we felt we had the team needed to produce a book that would portray the gardens beautifully and meaningfully. This is the result of that collaboration.

For readers just discovering the High Line and others who already know it, this book presents a journey through its gardens in all their seasons, illustrating in great detail their design, evolution, care and context. Though the journey can begin at any of the entry points, the original design intention was that it would begin by ascending the Gansevoort stair at the south end and continue north. Weve organized this book to match that order.

Roberts introduction is followed by a chapter titled Elevating the Nature of Modern Landscapes. Its purpose is to assess and illustrate revolutionary developments in industry, urban aesthetics, horticulture and ecology that led to the creation of an unprecedented urban landscape that has unique global resonance. The next section, Gardens of the High Line, makes up the majority of the book. It begins with a map and follows with chapters devoted to each of the High Lines garden areas. These south-to-north portraits of place are augmented by chapters devoted to the gardens care, habitat value and seasonality, titled Cutback, Gardening, Life Line and Seasons.

We believe, as landscape architect James Corner has suggested, that the High Line in its totality is irreproducible: You just cant take it anywhere else. Its life, and the energy it has, are drawn in large measure from unique context. At the same time, we know its design ethos, the patterning of its plantings and the enlightened stewardship devoted to them is highly reproducible and broadly worthy of emulation. We hope this book will serve as a beautiful memory of a great place, as guide to the infinite opportunities it presents to practice the art of observation and as an inspiration to all who, publicly or privately, seek to elevate the nature of modern landscapes.

Early evening light illuminates grasses, seedheads of Queen Annes lace, and other self-sown plants on the High Line at the Rail Yards in this August 2008 view west to the Hudson River.

Robert Hammond

Robert Hammond on the High Line in 2007. Photo Barry Munger, courtesy of the artist.

When I first stepped up on the High Line in 1999, I truly fell in love. What I fell in love with was the tension. It was there in the juxtaposition between the hard and the soft, the wild grasses and billboards, the industrial relics and natural landscape, the views of both wildflowers and the Empire State Building. It was ugly and beautiful at the same time. And its that tension that gives the High Line its power.

Joshua David and I founded Friends of the High Line to try to share that magic. At first we just wanted to keep the space exactly as it was. We would leave all of the plants in place and simply put a path down the railway. It would have been a completely wild garden. That turned out not to be feasible. We had to remediate the structure, removing lead paint and putting in new drainage. This meant we had to take up everythingthe rails as well as all of the plants.

So we had to find a new way. We were not architects or planners. We thought New Yorkers should have a say in what happens on the High Line, so we asked the public for their ideas at a series of community input sessions. At one of these sessions, I received a card that said, The High Line should be preserved, untouched, as a wilderness area. No doubt you will ruin it. So it goes.

I kept that card posted above my desk. Because that has always been my biggest fear. That we couldnt capture that naturalistic beauty in its wild state. That we would ruin it.

Joel Sternfeld An Evening in July, 2000, 2000 (printed 2016) Pigment print, 13 17 inches (34.93 44.45 cm) Joel Sternfeld, courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York This image captures the view looking east on 30th Street.

What New Yorkers fell in love with was a series of photographs by Joel Sternfeld taken on the High Line between 1999 and 2000. These images gave many New Yorkers their first glimpses of that hidden wilderness and helped to catapult the movement to open it as a public space. Just one glimpse of Joels photography conveys the tension that we wanted in the reconstruction.

With that image in mind, we hosted a design competition, looking for visionaries with more experience and talent than us who could conceive and carry out what the space called forsomething as unexpected as the original. And we finally saw it again in the design that James Corner Field Operations, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and Piet Oudolf created. Drawing on the dynamic community of plants that had crowded the High Line for decades, the team designed a totally new experience that captured the soul of the space.

Other designs we received were either very architectural or tried to exactly recreate the original wild landscape. Neither of those concepts were right. A strictly architectural approach would certainly have sacrificed the magic of the wilderness. The opposite idea, of putting all of the wild plants back exactly as they had been, though logical at first glance, was too logical. We felt that approach would anesthetize the final effect. It would be like a wax museum of the old elevated tracks.