Cultivate Your Gardening Skills

Elevate your horticultural knowledge with our online courses in gardening, horticulture, and garden design. Delivered by esteemed experts, such as Piet Oudolf, Tom Cole, Dr. Noel Kingsbury, Annie Guilfoyle, and Sally Nex.

Planting the Piet Oudolf Way

Legendary landscape designer Piet Oudolf and Dr. Noel Kingsbury take you on a unique tour of the family grounds of the Hummelo estate, showing you how to develop a garden the Piet Oudolf way, with a special emphasis on structure, form and year-round interest.

You will learn which plants to use for structure and texture, how to combine them with repetition and matrix planting, how to plan for all seasons, and how to adapt the Piet Oudolf style for your local region. Piet also invites you into his studio to discover planting plans and how his garden designs develop over the year.

Good for all levels. Features 4 on demand video lectures, lifetime access, downloadable notes, practical planting design tasks and a small interactive online classroom.

Course Details

Piet Oudolf and Dr. Noel Kingsbury take you on an intimate tour of Piet’s family gardens at Hummelo to learn how to plant a garden the Piet Oudolf way and which plants to choose and combine. Piet will introduce plants and plant combinations and invites you inside his studio to look at planting ideas and how the garden design functions throughout the year.

You’ll discover how to develop a Piet Oudolf perennial garden design, what plants to select for shape, structure and colour, and how to modify the Piet Oudolf style for your region. To get comments from Dr Noel Kingsbury on your tasks, select the Expert option. Noel will be setting and marking work and with his contacts with gardeners around the world he has a distinct global viewpoint.

You’ll learn:

• Which plants to use for structure in garden design
• Elements of plants that create structure – seed heads, foliage and plant shapes
• How to combine plants to use texture and structure for garden design
• Planning your garden design to work through all seasons
• Choosing plants for your region
• Using repetition plants and matrix plants in your garden

The course includes:

• 4 on-demand video lesson – presented by Piet Oudolf and Dr Noel Kingsbury
• Lifetime access to the videos, notes and interactive class
• Flexible classes – join and learn when and where you like
• Downloadable lesson notes
• Practical planting design projects (with tutor feedback available)
• Access on your mobile, PC, Mac or laptop
• Small interactive online classroom – chat online to students from around the world and share your creative ideas

Time to complete the Piet Oudolf planting course:

Every student is different but in general they think the whole course will take around 7 hours 30 minutes to complete including:

• Video lesson: 1 hour 30 minutes in total
• Course notes: 30 minutes per lesson
• Your planting design projects: at least 30 minutes per lesson
• Interactive classroom time: 15 minutes per lesson
• Tutor feedback review (Expert level): 15 minutes per lesson

You’ll need:

The course has optional practical tasks. You will need some images of plants. Ideal for all gardeners, from novice to pros wanting to learn how to emulate Piet Oudolf’s planting approach in their own gardens and ideas.

Ready to get started?

Simply add the course to your basket above and choose the ‘Expert’ option to receive individual feedback from Noel on your Piet Oudolf assignments and questions.

What You’ll Learn

Explore the lessons and topics covered across the course.

1. Plant Structure

With guidance and personal feedback from Noel on this first project you will orientate yourself with plants which have good and distinctive structure: flower heads, seed heads, foliage, or the shape of the plant overall.

2. Plant Combinations

Having focused on the individual structure of varying plants during the first project you will now start to consider effective combinations of both structure and texture.

3. Considering Seasonality

Now it is time to plan a seasonal calendar for the plants combinations, considering for how long they hold their good structure, and important consideration in any design..

4. Plant Suggestions For Your Region

At last, a time to concentrate on the plants that are best for your area with regard to the following: Repeating elements, scatter plants (plants with a limited season of impact, rather inconspicuous before and after their period of performance), and matrix plants (plants that can be utilized to cover much of the ground in a planting and act as a backdrop to more prominent species)

You May Also Like

Explore related courses to continue building your skills.