Oudolf Garten | Piet Oudolf

A garden created by Dutch designer Piet Oudolf was planted on the Vitra Campus in Weil am Rhein in May 2020. The artfully composed wilderness will be in full bloom from summer to early autumn.

Dutchman Piet Oudolf is regarded as a pioneer for a generation of garden designers who in the late 1980s began to question conventional practices, finding traditional landscape gardening too decorative, labour-intensive and resource-consuming. Instead they turned to perennial, often self-regenerating plants, shrubs, grasses, bushes and wildflowers, which had been long ignored as garden plants, and favoured an equally unconventional layout of the plantings.

Around 30,000 plants have been used, including specimens with such mysterious names as Persicaria amplexicaule ‘Alba’, Echinacea pallida ‘Hula Dancer’ or Molinia purple moor grass (‘Moorhexe’). They supply the framework for the garden, which largely dispenses with built structures, but also declines to serve as mere decoration for the surrounding architecture. Instead, the landscaping complements the buildings and imbues them with new perspectives, as Oudolf emphasises.

Beehives on the Campus
Bees have also been kept on the Vitra Campus since 2020: beehives are located next to the Oudolf Garten and house a population that is expected to reach a total of six colonies in the not-too-distant future. The bees are kept according to a combined nesting method that allows them to build natural honeycombs at the bottom of the beehive.

Two Vitra employees, who are trained apiculturists, look after the bee colonies. The beehives are coated with colourful, natural, eco-friendly paint – and visitors to the campus are requested to not get closer than photo distance.