Hauser & Wirth: Oudolf Field

Hauser and Wirth near Bruton is a lovely place to visit, with galleries, cafes, a shop and  the fabulous Oudolf Field designed by the fabulous prairie  planter, Piet Oudolf. 

I love this view of the field looking back towards the galleries, with huge beds on either side of a walkway punctuated by circular close cut areas of grass. The planting is a delight, I think you can see Penstemon 'Husker Red' on the right hand side, it was much admired by a young couple who asked us what the plant was called. For £5, it's possible to buy an illustrated map of the gardens and the planting

It's not easy to get good photographs of the field, possibly because it's on such a large scale. When we were there in June, the Eremurus were fabulous, rising up in various of the beds, giving a great rhythm to the planting:

and the Alliums were also lovely

The planting also extends to the courtyard where the Martagon lilies looked lovely

The summer exhibition at H&W is Henry Moore Sharing Form, it runs until 4th of September, this is what the website says about it: 'The exhibition takes as its starting point the artist’s early fascination with the Neolithic site of Stonehenge and continued exploration of the upright abstract form. Moore first encountered the prehistoric monuments under the moonlight as a young man in 1921; fifty-two years later he embarked on a series of lithographs on the subject. Moore was fascinated by the relationship between the towering masses of ancient stone, their size and siting in the landscape, and the mysterious ‘depths and distances’ evoked on his returning visits. For Moore, the power and intensity of such large forms set against land and sky precipitated career-long investigations into scale, material and volume and the juxtaposition of art and nature, which is presented throughout the exhibition'.

The piece above looks wonderful in the courtyard, it's Called 'The Wall:Background for Sculpture'

Here it is from another perspective

And this piece has the Oudolf Field behind it and is called 'Locking Piece'

It's a wonderful Henry Moore exhibition and the Piet Oudolf Field is beautiful., if you haven't been, it's well worth a visit. This post marks the end of my posts about the 2022 Garden Tour which has taken weeks to finish writing about! Where should we go next year?