Horticultural Alliance Presents New Perennial Lecture With Deborah Chud on January 14

The Horticultural Alliance of the Hamptons monthly lecture series continues this Sunday, January 14, with garden designer and coach Deborah Chud, who will speak over Zoom on the New Perennial movement and plant pairings that strike the right balance between coherence and contrast.

In her presentation, “New Perennials: A Love Story,” she shares the design principles of the New Perennial movement, a naturalistic planting design approach that arose in the late 1970s and early 1980s as an alternative to traditional garden design, eschewing formality and embracing the aesthetics observed in nature. It uses herbaceous plants and grasses that return every year, with no replanting necessary, in gardens that become self-sustaining.

“At its roots, the New Perennial movement in naturalistic planting design is about making gardens in symbiosis with nature. It calls for a wilder aesthetic, attuned to ecology, and informed by horticulture,” according to TheNewPerennialist.com.

Chud lives in Massachusetts, where, before she was a gardener, she was a physician. During an interview last week, she shared that after retiring, she and her husband decided to downsize. They bought a tiny piece of property three doors down from the Victorian home where they had lived for 30 years, and they built a contemporary home.

She was in charge of finding a landscape designer. She said before then she had never planted anything besides herbs in a pot. A friend referred her to a landscape contracting company, Massachusetts-based R. P. Marzilli & Co., and she checked out their website.

“I had seen some photos of a garden that they did on Nantucket that completely blew me away,” she said. “And once I saw that garden, I couldn’t look at anything else.”

However, when she spoke with one of the Marzilli & Co. owners, it became clear that the landscape firm would be out of her reach.

“I told her what we could afford, and she said, ‘Well, you can’t afford us,’” Chud recalled.

The owner informed her that Piet Oudolf designed the garden she loved so much and recommended she get his books.

“I said, ‘Is he local?’ and she burst out laughing,” Chud said. “And she said, ‘No, he lives in the Netherlands, and he’s the most famous landscape designer in the world.’”

In New York, Oudolf is known for being the designer of The High Line, a 1.45-mile elevated linear park on a former railroad spur on the west side of Manhattan.

“Naturalistic landscape designers use different kinds of plants, and they use them in a different way,” Chud said. “And the goals of those designers — and Piet Oudolf in particular — is to create an impression of nature.”

One of the salient features of that impression is a balance between what Oudolf calls coherence and contrast, she said. “And that balance is derived from observations of nature.”

The balance comes in the relationships among the shapes, colors and textures of plants.

“The ideal season of interest for people that do this work tends to be nine months,” Chud said. “Whereas for a traditional garden, it could be, let’s say, four to five months maybe.”

That means thinking about how the plants will appear in winter, coated in ice and snow, and appreciating their sculptural qualities.

Chud found an affordable landscape architect and asked for a garden in the same language as Oudolf’s designs. The landscape architect promised she could deliver just that.

“The following spring it was installed — and it was horrible,” Chud said. “It was hideous. It had nothing to do with Piet Oudolf’s work.”

She couldn’t even bear to lift the shades in her bedroom, which looked out to the garden. Deciding that she couldn’t live with it, she set out to redesign the garden herself.

“I immersed myself in Piet Oudolf’s books,” she said. “I learned everything I could about the plants.”

She went from not knowing the Latin name or even one plant and knowing nothing about soil, water and light requirements to stuffing herself with all this information, she said.

“It was a process that went on for years, and along the way I developed a kind of theory about how to do what I wanted to do. And my theory was that the best way to approach the style of garden that I wanted was to focus on Piet Oudolf’s plant combinations,” she said.

She studied all the Oudolf planting plans she could find and took note of which plants he juxtaposed.

She started out documenting this on index cards. “And then when COVID struck, I had a lot of time on my hands and I decided to put the index cards and all that information on a spreadsheet,” she said.

Chud created a database with 5,000 rows of the plant combinations she had extracted from Oudolf’s books.

To expand her knowledge on naturalistic design, she took online courses offered by Noel Kingsbury, a British garden designer who has collaborated with Oudolf on design books.

“He was essentially my first teacher,” Chud said of Kingsbury.

She shared an excerpt of her body of research on Oudolf with Kingsbury to get his thoughts on it. Kingsbury was impressed and asked for a FaceTime tour of her garden. Then he asked her to present her research at an international webinar he was hosting for GardenMasterclass.org.

Following that first presentation, she was invited to talk at libraries, green organizations and garden clubs. She’s now entering her eighth season as a New Perennial gardener.

“My garden grew, and a lot of people find it of interest because it’s unusual,” Chud said. “It’s not like other people’s gardens for the most part.”

Most of the plants used in New Perennial and naturalistic design were not on the market prior to plantsmen like Oudolf breeding them.

New Perennials are closer to their natural ancestors than the highly bred plants with a frozen, stiff quality found in English country gardens, Chud said. The designers in the movement “started using different kinds of plants to create effects in gardens that made them look more like nature, such as the ability to move in a breeze.”

Likewise, the light texture of these plants means they look beautiful and interesting and when backlit, she said. When designing a garden, she positions plants that catch light particularly well so that the sun sets behind them, which she said creates magical effects that have to be seen to be believed.

“Whereas, if you put the sun behind a rosebush, it just doesn’t really do much. It’s not magical. It’s anything but magical. It’s probably pretty deadly,” she said.

New Perennial Gardens use a mix of cultivated plants and native plants. Native plants require fewer inputs from gardeners and provide food and habitat for native wildlife that they co-evolved with.

Chud said that committing to all native plants is an ideology for some designers but that she is nonideological.

“Native and naturalistic are not the same thing,” Chud said. “... There’s a certain amount of overlap, and I think naturalistic landscape designers tend to be people who are respectful of those kinds of environmental issues, and they try to use native plants as often as possible.”

She said the native plant palette is somewhat constrained, so to get one’s desired variety or degree of interest in a garden may require going outside the native canon.

Chud’s presentation aims to give the audience a new way of looking at gardens.

“What I hope is that they see gardens differently after hearing my presentation, both their own and other people’s — public gardens and private gardens,” she said. “And I think they will, because the kinds of issues that I address within that construct of the balance between coherence and contrast are issues that most people haven’t ever thought about.”

Deborah Chud presents “New Perennials: A Love Story,” on Sunday, January 14, at 2 p.m. via Zoom. Admission is $10, or free for Horticultural Alliance of the Hamptons members. Visit hahgarden.org to register.