Wolfgang Oehme

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Wolfgang Oehme (born May 18, 1930 in Chemnitz , † December 15, 2011 in Towson , USA) was a German garden architect.

Life

Oehme was the only son of a police officer. He grew up in the Wissmannhof in Chemnitz. As a child, Oehme was already working in his uncle's allotment garden in the Yorck area at Knappteich, which made a lasting impression on him. The garden also became important in providing the family with food. Oehme's father was transferred to Bitterfeld in 1943 . The family moved into a house at Richard-Wagner-Straße 11 that had a garden in which Oehme grew vegetables. Oehme left school in 1947 and began an apprenticeship at the Illge nursery. After completing his apprenticeship, he worked in the municipal garden department, where the landscape architect Hans-Joachim Bauer introduced him to Karl Foerster's ideas . From 1952 he worked in the nursery Späth in Baumschulenweg in Berlin (East).

Oehme studied from 1952 to 1954 in Dahlem at the teaching and research institute for horticulture (LuFA) with a scholarship garden architecture. However, drawing and chemistry did not suit him, he was more interested in horticultural practice. In 1953 he helped dig trenches on the grounds of the International Garden Show in the Alter Elbpark in Hamburg ( Planten un Blomen ). He admired the designer of the exhibition, Karl Plomin . Oehme moved to West Berlin in 1953. After completing his studies, he worked at the Waterer Sons & Crisp nursery in Bagshot and then got a job at the municipal green space office in Frankfurt / Main. From 1956 he worked for the Delius company in Nuremberg. Oehme, a great admirer of Karl May's works , emigrated from Nuremberg to the USA in 1957 on the recommendation of Hubert Owens , after visiting his family in the GDR again for Christmas . After stopping over in Ireland, Iceland and Newfoundland, he landed at Idlewild Airport in New York. He first worked for the landscape architect Bruce Baetjer before he was hired as a landscape architect in 1959 by the Baltimore County Office of Planning and Zoning and Recreation and Parks . Among other things, he designed playgrounds and golf courses. In 1966 he moved to the company Rouse Co. and designed gardens with ornamental grasses and perennials, but without lawns. His work was difficult because there were hardly any nurseries selling suitable plants. With the help of Leo Vollmer, Oehme's partner Kurt Bluemel founded a nursery in 1964 that was able to provide the appropriate plants. In 1977 Oehme founded his own company in Washington , Oehme, van Sweden & Associates (OvS), together with the American landscape planner James van Sweden . Her style was marketed as "the New American Garden". In 2008 he retired from the company and founded WOCO Organic Gardens LLC with Carol Oppenheimer.

He often went to Germany to buy plants and visited botanical gardens and especially the federal horticultural shows . He also smuggled seeds into the USA, hidden in a hollowed-out book, as the selection of ornamental plants was initially very limited. Relatives in Germany also sent him seeds. In his later years he became increasingly eccentric, his lack of a sense of finance leading to conflicts within the company. Oehme was married to Shirley Zinkhan and they divorced in 2004. The marriage resulted in a son, Roland Oehme. Oehme died of stomach cancer at the age of 81.

The English garden author Noel Kingsbury describes Oehme as a loner who only cared about his gardens. He reports how Oehme visited a garden he had designed and pulled up hard-working lizards that the owners had planted, but which he disliked. When asked about it, he said: "This is my garden, not yours!" Oehme spoke with a Saxon accent all his life .

style

Oehme was strongly influenced by Karl Foerster. Later he was in correspondence with his widow, Eva Foerster, and sent her seeds from America. He was also in contact with her daughter Marianne Foerster. He described the catalog of the Foerster nursery as "his bible", Foerster's demand for "blossoms in all seasons" and "a horrible garden without grasses" became his motto. He distributed Foerster's book "Entry of the ferns and grasses into the gardens as well as some significant ornamental leaves" (1957) to many of his customers, even if they did not speak German.

Since 1962, Oehme has designed lawn-free gardens , a revolutionary innovation in the USA at the time. He pioneered a new style in the USA in the 1970s that replaced sterile (and irrigation-intensive) lawns with extensive plantings of shrubs and, above all, grasses. Oehme describes this as a "crusade". In his obituary, the American journalist Jacques Kelly calls him the "grass pope". The grasses and tall shrubs planted in curved rows create a prairie-like effect, which influenced the work of the Dutch garden architect Piet Oudolf (Chicago High Line), among others .

His favorite plants were Rudbeckia fulgida 'Goldsturm' and Calamagrostis x acutiflora (imported from Switzerland by Bluemel); also feather grass, Dost , Blue Diamond , yucca , bamboo , Stielblüten grass , Pennisetum , switchgrass and stonecrop he frequently used. On the other hand, he hated lawns and azaleas .

In an interview with the Baltimore Sun in 2005, he emphasized his preference for natural gardens: "Most people like [their gardens] tame, I like it wild." In his plantings, however, Oehme did not value the use of native species, but was primarily interested in the overall aesthetic impression. Oehme described the traditional American lawns as cemetery-like.

Gardens

Pauline and Leo Vollmer's garden in Maryland was one of the first American private gardens that Oehme designed based on his ideas. The couple helped popularize their ideas among wealthy Americans. Oehme designed several public green spaces in Baltimore, such as the median of the Baltimore-Washington Parkway and the hard shoulder of North Charles Street. Numerous public areas in his home town of Towson were also planted by Oehme.

With his partner James van Sweden he designed, among other things, the Hudson River Park in Battery Park in Manhattan on the banks of the Hudson River and the garden of Alex and Carole Rosenberg on Long Island , also in New York. This, planted with grasses and shrubs, became a kind of model garden for the New Perennial Movement. In Washington they designed Pennsylvania Avenue, Francis Scott Key Park, the greenery of Reagan National Airport , the Treasury, the National Gallery of Art , the International Center and the Virginia Avenue Gardens of the " Federal Reserve Bank " on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington (1976), as well as the national monument for the Second World War , the "New American Garden" in the National Arboretum , the German-American Friendship Garden around a tree planted by Karl Carstens in 1983 and the " Freedom Plaza " park . They designed Morrill Hall Gardens for the University of Minnesota and the National Education and Training Center campus in Shepherdstown , West Virginia for the US Fish and Wildlife Service . The company has also worked for numerous media personalities, such as television star Oprah Winfrey. In Germany, Oehme designed the garden for Allianz Versicherung in Magdeburg , green areas in Chemnitz and in Bitterfeld the greening of the contaminated spoil heaps.

Awards and memberships

Oehme was a member of the American Society of Landscape Architects . In 1992 he received the "Landscape Design Award" of the American Horticultural Society , in 2002 the George Robert White Medal of Honor, and in 2011 the Longhouse Award. He taught at the universities of Pennsylvania and Georgia .

Works

  • with James Van Sweden: Gardening with Water: How James van Sweden and Wolfgang Oehme build and plant Fountains, swimming Pools, Lily Ponds, water edges. Random, New York 1994, ISBN 0-679-42946-8 .
  • with James Van Sweden: Bold Romantic Gardens. The New World Landscapes of Oehme and van Sweden. (Photos by Susan Rademacher Fry) Spacemaker Press, Washington DC 1998, ISBN 1-888931-10-8 .
  • with James van Sweden: Gardening with Nature: How James van Sweden and Wolfgang Oehme Plant Slopes, Meadows, Outdoor Rooms and Garden Screens. Random House, New York 1997, ISBN 0-679-42947-6 .
  • with John Greenlee and Derek Fell : The Encyclopedia of Ornamental Grasses: How to grow and use over 250 beautiful and versatile Plants. Rodale Books, Emmaus 1992, ISBN 0-87596-100-2 .

literature

  • Stefan Leppert: Between garden grasses: Wolfgang Oehme and his grandiose gardens in the New World. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-421-03640-7 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Stefan Leppert: Ornamental Grasses. Wolfgang Oehme and the New American Garden. Francis Lincoln, London 2009, p. 15.
  2. ^ Stefan Leppert: Ornamental Grasses. Wolfgang Oehme and the New American Garden. Francis Lincoln, London 2009, p. 23.
  3. ^ Stefan Leppert: Ornamental Grasses. Wolfgang Oehme and the New American Garden. Francis Lincoln, London 2009, p. 25.
  4. ↑ 1930 - 2011 Wolfgang Oehme. The Cultural Landscape Foundation, accessed July 5, 2017 .
  5. ^ Stefan Leppert: Ornamental Grasses. Wolfgang Oehme and the New American Garden. Francis Lincoln, London 2009, p. 32.
  6. ↑ James van Sweden - a memoir. Noel's Garden Blog, September 30, 2013, accessed July 5, 2017 .
  7. ↑ a b Wolfgang Oehme RIP. Noel's Garden Blog, December 17, 2011, accessed July 5, 2017 .
  8. ^ Stefan Leppert: Ornamental Grasses. Wolfgang Oehme and the New American Garden. Francis Lincoln, London 2009, p. 18.
  9. ^ Stefan Leppert: Ornamental Grasses. Wolfgang Oehme and the New American Garden. Francis Lincoln, London 2009, p. 18.
  10. ^ Stefan Leppert: Ornamental Grasses. Wolfgang Oehme and the New American Garden. Francis Lincoln, London 2009, pp. 19f.
  11. ↑ Karl Foerster: Entry of the ferns and grasses into the gardens. Neumann, Radebeul 1957, DNB 451311248 ; since then published in many editions, most recently in 1988 by Neumann Verlag / Ulmer Verlag, ISBN 3-8001-6365-9 .
  12. ↑ a b Wolfgang Oehme, landscape architect. The Baltimore Sun, December 16, 2011, accessed July 5, 2017 .
  13. ^ Stefan Leppert: Ornamental Grasses. Wolfgang Oehme and the New American Garden. Francis Lincoln, London 2009, p. 34.
  14. ^ Stefan Leppert: Ornamental Grasses. Wolfgang Oehme and the New American Garden. Francis Lincoln, London 2009, p. 24.
personal data
SURNAME Oehme, Wolfgang
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German garden architect
DATE OF BIRTH May 18, 1930
PLACE OF BIRTH Chemnitz
DATE OF DEATH December 15, 2011
Place of death Towson , USA