Immersive and spectacular: Piet Oudolf’s new borders at RHS Wisley reviewed

Piet Oudolf’s long borders at Wisley were worn out. The famous designer had in fact become a bit embarrassed by them: they’d done well for 20 years but in that time his own style had evolved – and so had people’s tastes.

Oudolf is now such a household name that his pointillist landscaping is considered fine art on paper, let alone when actually planted up. (There are weighty coffee-table books exploring his art.) But the long borders had become, well, just borders, on either side of a long grassy walk up the hill from the Wisley glasshouses. Many of the people who visit Wisley for a walk – rather than to peer at plants – were perfectly capable of ignoring the whole lot.

So this year, the Royal Horticultural Society ripped it all up and got Oudolf to design them a new two-acre space. Instead of hoping people would notice his dreamy, prairie-style planting as they sauntered past, with its airy, ephemeral perennials, he forced everyone to really look at them. His new design was much more characteristic of the style for which the 80-year-old Dutch artist has become so well-loved.

It is an immersive landscape. A sinuous main path runs through looping beds set out with plants in Oudolf’s two formations: block and matrix. The first creates a generous drift that leads the eye through the planting by repeating the same herb or colour. It also contains a ‘scatter’ of another plant, often contrasting in colour and form. Some of the colour-combinations are well balanced: rich, red Heleniums with sudden spikes of Salvia ‘Blue Spire’ (formerly known as Perovskia). Others are less predictable, such as the light-pink Sidalcea, ‘Little Princess’, and the orange Asclepias tuberosa, or the tall, yellow helicopter-landing-pad flowerheads of the Achillea mixed with mid-pink wand loosestrife, the Lythrum virgatum ‘Happyness’.