The quote in the title is from a statement by Charles Waldheim about the work of landscape designer Piet Oudolf in a January 31 article in the New York Times, “A landscape in winter, dying heroically.” (I ran across this in a post to Alexander Trevi’s interesting Pruned blog.)

Photos by Herman Wouters for the New York Times article.

One of Oudolf’s interests is in constructing landscapes that acknowledge the cycles of nature, the browning and the dying, along with the greening and regrowth.

“You look at this, and it goes deeper than what you see,” Oudolf is quoted. “It reminds you of something in the genes—nature, or the longing for nature.”

“You accept death. You don’t take the plants out, because they still look good. And brown is also a color.”

These are gardens about deeper things. They’re as beautiful as all those merely skin-deep gardens, but they’re so much more nourishing. I wrote earlier referring to a comment about Monet’s gardens being designed to expose natural processes. Oudolf’s gardens do the same thing, and I’d love to be able spend some time lost in his landscapes…

Piet Oudolf’s website.