MEADOW MAN

James van Sweden, FASLA, visited Wolfgang Oehmes Vollmer Garden for the first time in 1964. "Id never seen such a beautiful private garden," van Sweden says. "Id seen ornamental grasses in the Netherlands, but never on this scale."

Together, Oehme, who died of cancer in late December, and van Sweden created a new style of landscape in the 1970s and 1980s. Their work combined tall meadow plants, then uncommon in American gardens, in painterly massings, often around highly structured pools and paved areas.

They were not the first or only landscape architects to encourage smaller lawns or more meadow plantings. Landscape architects such as Isabella Pendleton were seeking low - maintenance alternatives to lawn in the 1940s. A. E. Bye Jr. called for wider use of low - maintenance meadow grasses in Landscape Architecture in 1961, noting they are "striking" against the snow. Darrel Morrison, FASLA, wrote about his work with native prairie plants in 1975, and an older school of landscape architects including Jens Jensen had promoted large naturalistic clearings.

But Oehme, van Sweden & Associates blended modernism with European influences in ways that were fresh and caught the attention of many people both inside and outside the landscape architecture profession. Its partners woke the landscape world to the ecstatic potential of low - maintenance herbaceous gardens over the past four decades as few others have.

Of the two, Oehme was the planting design genius. He was born in Germany in 1930 and began gardening at the age of five. After high school, he took jobs with a nursery and the Parks and Cemeteries Department in Bitterfeld, East Germany. There he met the landscape architect Hans - Joachim Bauer, who introduced him to the work of Karl Foerster and encouraged him to pursue a degree in landscape architecture. As a student at the University of Berlin in the early 1950s, Oehme was heavily influenced by Karl Plomins use of ornamental grasses at the Planten un Blomen Gardens in Hamburg.

Oehme immigrated to Baltimore in 1957. He worked with the landscape architect Bruce Baetjer but soon took a job with Baltimore Countys parks department. During the early 1960s, he would often experiment with plants in small residential projects he did on the side. Those early commissions included the Shirley Rice Garden, a spare modernist design that won a merit award in a contest sponsored by ASLA and House fif Home and Life magazines in 1962, and the Vollmer Garden, begun in 1961, which showcased many of the perennials and grasses that would characterize Oehmes later planting schemes.

In 1964, Oehme partnered with Kurt Bluemel, a fellow German immigrant, and Leo and Pauline Vollmer to start a nursery to expand the number of plants available to him. Oehmes investment in the nursery was short lived —he sold his shares after two years —but he retained a close relationship with Bluemel, who supplied many of what were then unusual perennials and ornamental grasses for OvSs gardens over the years.

Oehme first collaborated with van Sweden in 1971, when van Sweden asked him if he would be interested in working together on van Swedens garden in Georgetown. "We did a drawing, and Wolfgang added the plants," van Sweden explains. Their partnership began four years later. Van Swedens small garden acted as a showroom for their work, and his basement served as their office.

Their firms most important job in the early years was a commission to redesign the gardens at the Federal Reserve in Washington, D.C., in 1977, which helped to inspire more sophisticated planting design in public spaces. "Instead of boring and dull public plantings, we create botanic gardens," Oehme, a Fellow of ASLA, told Landscape Architecture in July 1997. Their style of planting came to be known as the "New American Garden" style.

Shortly after Oehmes death, his clients and fellow landscape architects offered remembrances of his work and the ways it inspired them.

PAULINE VOLLMER, EARLY RESIDENTIAL CLIENT, BALTIMORE:

In the early 1960s, I was an enthusiastic gardener, looking for a way to eliminate the hours spent digging crabgrass out of our lawn and spraying the roses. My husband, Leo, fervently supported this quest, and a close friend recommended that we contact Wolfgang Oehme, a gentleman who was working in the Baltimore County Planning Office.

We invited Wolfgang over to look at our half - acre plot and provide suggestions for making our garden maintenance more palatable. We wanted to try only a small area at first. He presented us with a rough sketch of a very large, unusual flowerbed. However, after days of looking at the design, we became fascinated with it. We did the work ourselves, with Wolfgangs guidance...and criticism! When we had completed the first area we could hardly wait to finish all of the grounds.

The new garden gave us great pleasure. There were some strange plants, and it provided interest all year - round. Even familiar plants such as black - eyed Susans had a new look —they were massed dramatically. Since we created the garden, the seasons are more exciting and the views from inside my home more interesting. I am now 95, and the garden has kept me out of the old ladies home.

KURT BLUEMEL, KURTBLUEMEL, INC., BALDWIN, MARYLAND:

Iknew Wolfgang as an artist. In the 50 years that I have spent in this country, we were able to share in each others work and build our collective idea of year - round horticulture.

Wolfgang conducted a horticultural orchestra. His landscapes, quietly beginning in spring, like the "Pilgrims Chorus" of Richard Wagners Tannhauser, would awaken. The excitement would build to a crescendo in summer with masses of colors carefully chosen to balance one another —a horticultural version of the Academic Festival Overture by Johannes Brahms —then quietly settle into Antonin Dvoraks New World Symphony with a look reminiscent of our large prairies out west. Calm autumn days would lend a respite to the garden and gardener. Then, all at once you would realize the symphony was not yet finished, as spent flowers and seed heads poked through a cover of snow. During the quiet of winter, one would find himself anticipating an early peek at what hope spring would bring, but Wolfgang would not leave us waiting long —soon the budding flowers of the witch hazel would appear. At that moment, we knew it would all begin again.

Like his idol Karl Foerster, Wolfgang believed that one lifetime for the horticulturist is not enough. The hope to come back again and again is present in every planting.

DAVID LILLY, CLIENT FOR THE FEDERAL RESERVE PROJECT, MINNEAPOLIS:

There was a really severe frost in Washington back in the 1970s, and it killed all the plants in the Federal Reserve Garden. I was the newest member of the board, and as such I was in charge of taking care of the property. I didnt know what to do. But that day, when I got home, my wife showed me an article in the Washington paper about Jim van Sweden and his garden. That was the beginning of a long relationship with Jim and Wolfgang.

They taught me that the garden design could be a professional matter, not just a hobby. Public landscapes didnt have to be limited to trees and lawns; they could be lush with tall grasses and perennials.

CAROLE ROSENBERG, FIRST CLIENT IN THE HAMPTONS, NEW YORK:

Life changed for my husband, Alex, and me in 1981 when Lila Katzen suggested we call Oehme, van Sweden to create a garden for us. Katzen had created a sculpture for OvSs garden at the Federal Reserve. This was the beginning of a 30 - year friendship with Wolfgang Oehme. His partnership with James van Sweden and his knowledge of plants were extraordinary.

They were a perfect team, each bringing important components to their landscape projects.

While planning our garden, to be installed in the spring of 1982, they transformed the Alex Rosenberg Gallery into a sculpture garden for a show called Sculpture Returns to the Garden, featuring Katzens newest work. It was my first experience with Wolfgangs hands - on planting style.

Wolfgangs visits developed into a special personal relationship, and he became our horticulture teacher and a member of our family. He treated our garden as his own, and his frequent visits with his dear friends Carol Oppenheimer and Paul van Meter have been highlights for us. He was always finding new and unusual plants to try out, making our garden more interesting. He has left us with wonderful memories, and living with our "New American Garden" adds an enormous dimension to our life.

FRANK CASTAGNA, CLIENT FOR AMERICANA MANHASSET SHOPPING CENTER, MANH ASSET, NEW YORK:

In the early 1980s, a photograph of a new planting of grasses and perennials in the New York Times caught my attention. The name in the photographs caption was Wolfgang Oehme. We were already working with the architect Peter Marino to transform the Americana Manhasset, a shopping center my family owned on Long Island, into a more urban, luxury shopping destination, and we called up Oehme, van Sweden to design the landscape. So began a wonderful relationship.

Wolfgangs love of gardens was palpable. He took a personal interest in our garden, picking weeds as we walked the property together. He even planted one of his "pet" trees at Americana Manhasset on the hillcrest of our most public garden. As a sapling, it blended into the landscape but then grew to become what I thought was a scraggly looking tree. I asked that it be dug out since it was inconsistent with our tailored look and not part of the planting plan. But this Caucasian wingnut was treasured by Wolfgang, who had sprouted it from a seed, nurtured it as a sapling, and planted it himself. Ive since had other trees that crowded it cut down. Wolfgangs tree is a legacy for us at Americana Manhasset: a fitting memorial by which we will remember him.

ERIC GROFT, ASLA, OVS, WASHINGTON, D.C.:

Wolfgang was not a big man; he was of medium build and fairly trim. But his hands were like bear paws. When we first shook hands 25 years ago and his rough skin enveloped mine, I knew I was in the presence of a man who worked the earth. Up until the end he could lay out plants and plant them as quickly and as purposefully as anyone. To watch him was like watching a painter.

I barely knew what a perennial was coming from the University of Virginias landscape architecture program in the 1980s. Wolfgang would take me and other employees on garden tours to teach us —sometimes without informing the clients before we came.

Wolfgang was a free spirit with a total disregard for authority and protocol. Once, when we stopped by a garden, Wolfgang saw some impatiens that the client planted to fill a bare spot Wolfgang proceeded to pull them out like weeds. Then, he got some perennials out of his trunk and planted them in the space.

I will never forget the day we laid out the water garden at a residence in Greenwich, Connecticut. Plants were being delivered. Contractors and plants were everywhere. I turned around and Wolfgang had stripped down to his underwear. "Wolfgang!" I exclaimed. "I always plant the water garden naked," he said in his thick German accent. I told him this wasnt a good idea in Greenwich.

1 was fortunate enough to have visited Wolfgang in his final days. Next to his bed was a picture of him with our longtime patron Frank Castagna receiving a horticulture award at the White House. Barbara Bush presented the award for Rock Rim Ponds, a subdivision in Westchester, New York, where we had dredged several ponds and planted their edges with perennials and grasses to reverse the eutrophication process.

SHEILA BRADY, FASLA, OVS, WASHINGTON, D.C.:

On my first day of work at OvS, 25 years ago, Wolfgang took me on a field trip to several local gardens. At each place, he would point out the same plant, Fargesia nitida, a bamboo species. Fargesia was just one of Wolfgangs many treasured plants. He would carry around pictures of these plants in his wallet and proudly show them off to anyone who was interested, like a father showing off his children.

Wolfgang preferred to work with the plants and left working with clients up to us. Clients were often confused as to who he was when we arrived at a site for the planting installation, as he would immediately be off with the plants and crew and would often be found happily weeding.

LISA DELPLACE, ASLA, OVS, WASHINGTON, D.C.:

To say Wolfgang was passionate about plants would truly be an understatement Wolfgang would arrive at the office most days slightly late, just a little rumpled, and often with mud on his shoes. He would place his enormous black briefcase, overflowing with bananas, seed pods, twigs, and catalogs, on the bench near the door, and before ascending to his office he would walk the studio going from desk to desk commenting on our planting plans, correcting spelling, or quizzing us on a leaf or twig. The real wealth of his knowledge came when we were planting. Often the plans we had labored over were abandoned and left flapping in the wind. What mattered was the site and how it spoke to Wolfgang.

CAROL OPPENHEIMER, WOCO ORGANIC GARDENS, LLC, BALTIMORE:

Wolfgang and I established our new design practice, WOCO Organic Gardens, LLC, in 2008. The name rhymed with "loco," which we thought quite appropriate given that we were starting this company during an economic downturn. Our office spaces were a coffee shop, a restaurant, a hotel lobby, and my elderly Honda Civic. Yet, from our inception, we were able to take on impressive residential and public projects including the ecopark at the IRS National Headquarters in New Carrollton, Maryland, and Mollys Memorial Garden at the Calvert School in Baltimore.

When Wolfgang wasnt working on his clients gardens, he did guerrilla plantings in public spaces, planting trees where he thought they were needed. He weeded and buried vegetable peels to feed his plantings. During droughts, wed haul buckets of water to his beloved Celtis occidentalis, which he had planted all over like a "Johnny Hackberry Seed." Why hackberries? They provide food for at least six native butterflies.

This past October, we traveled to his beloved Germany. Wolfgang considered Goitzsche Park, adjacent to his hometown of Bitterfeld, his magnum opus. Seeing this vast, no - maintenance garden ablaze with fall color gave him enormous pleasure.

PAMELA BURTON, FASLA, PAMELA BURTON & COMPANY, SANTA MONICA, CALIFORNIA:

In the late 1970s, as my practice in Southern California was developing, I became aware of the work of Oehme and van Sweden. I was especially impressed by their use of meadow plants. Their landscape for the Federal Reserve Board introduced this look to the national stage.

While I never met Oehme personally, he became a mentor of mine somewhat indirectly. I had a chance to discuss ornamental grasses with Kurt Bluemel, an innovative nurseryman who collaborated with him, when Bluemel came to California to advise a friend on Disneys Animal Kingdom project in the 1990s. And Oehme wrote the foreword for The Encyclopedia of Ornamental Grasses, written by another friend, John Greenlee.

Finding sustainable alternatives to heavily irrigated lawns is an important part of my practice as well as many others on the West Coast. Designers like Oehme, van Sweden, Greenlee, and Bill Evans and Paul Comstock, ASLA, at Disney worked with an inclusive range of materials and, in the process, proposed a new paradigm for planting design that is now familiar.

DARREL MORRISON, FASLA, NEW YORK CITY:

The work of Wolfgang Oehme and James van Sweden was pioneering in the 1970s. Their layered landscapes, filled with a rich array of herbaceous plants, contrasted dramatically with most designed landscapes of the mid - 2 oth century —filled with lawns, beds of mulch, and monochromatic, unchanging "ground covers" like Hedera helix.

I was experimenting with native prairie grasses when I discovered their work, and I felt almost immediately that Wolfgang and Jim and I were kindred spirits. Over the years, I had the opportunity to get to know them both as professional colleagues and as friends. I visited a number of their gardens, and, on occasion, I collaborated with them on native meadow plantings.

I am a bit of a native plant zealot, and as I came to know Wolfgang and Jim better, I felt free to question them on the inclusion of certain nonnative plants in their gardens. Most notably, I questioned the use of Miscanthus sinensis, which I had observed escaping cultivation and moving into surrounding landscapes. Wolfgang was not necessarily swayed by my stance on Miscanthus and responded that "all of the plants we use are native —somewhere."

Notwithstanding our philosophical differences, we remained friends. I will forever appreciate what Wolfgang and Jim did to enrich the American landscape, creating gardens whose beauty transcends the seasons, where luxuriant drifts of grasses and perennial flowers move through the landscape. "I like it wild," Wolfgang would say. I like it wild, too.

DOUGLAS HOERR, FASLA, HOERRSCHAUDT, CHICAGO:

Wolfgang Oehme was that rare blend of plantsman and sophisticated designer. With his added touch of entrepreneurial spirit, he helped change the American landscape. He brought a never - ending passion to finding new, improved plant varieties to use as paint on his landscape canvases. He exposed a new generation of landscape architects to the power of horticulture and helped put the "landscape" back into our profession.

His skill and focus as an avid plantsman are close to my heart. Years ago, after a gardening stint in England, I met James van Sweden in the south of France. He suggested I might interview with Oehme when I returned to the States. Their firm matched my design aesthetic and passion for horticulture perfectiy; it was exactiy the type of place I wanted to work. In fact, I had no plans to interview anywhere else.

But I didnt get the job! I was crushed. So, I came to Chicago and started my own firm. I have no regrets, but having Wolfgang as a mentor would have been a true honor.

ROLAND OEHME, GREEN HARMONY DESIGN, TOWSON, MARYLAND:

Growing up with Wolfgang Oehme as my dad, I learned to love nature and animals. He had a fishpond as a child where he took care of the fish and frogs, and he made sure Id have a similar experience. Every fall, we collected some praying mantis egg cases and brought them to our garden. The next summer I would watch them hatch as little tiny insects. Seeing a new insect or mammal visit his gardens made my dad very happy.

When I was a kid, my dad took me almost everywhere that he went. We drove all over Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Virginia to visit his firms job sites, and I would often help with the work: pruning trees, spreading soil, and planting. We traveled to Germany almost every summer. We had many friends and relatives to stay with —both in West Germany and East Germany, which was scary to enter with the Russian troops at the border.

Almost every day we were visiting a different garden, taking slides. A highlight of our visits was a trip to the BUG A, a biennial horticulture exposition. Dad was always searching for design inspiration and new plants to add to his palette that were both beautiful and strong. He would do whatever he had to do to get a new plant that he liked. He would take the seeds, dig out a piece, call up his nursery friends, or even become friends with the garden director. On many of our return trips from Germany, my dad would bring newly discovered plants or seeds back with him, sneaking them through customs.

Many of the plants he helped popularize in the United States were cultivars of American plants, selected in Germany and given German names, like Rudbeckiafulgida Goldsturm. After many American nurseries changed the German names into English, Dad would edit entire nursery catalogs, adding the forgotten German plant names, and mail them back to the nurseries owners requesting corrections.

Thank you, Dad, for being a brilliant, creative, kind, gentle, happy, intelligent, loving, patient, positive, progressive, and warm father. I will continue to champion your bold design ideas and your love for nature, doing my part to make the world a better place for all.