Weeds
Julija Šukys
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After a cup of hot chocolate in a café under an old railway bridge, we climbed a set of stairs to discover the unexpected sight of birch trees, ornamental grasses (“How can these jewels of the garden have been virtually ignored for so long?” asked the great German plant breeder, Karl Foerster in 19572 ), and perennials at various stages of their life cycles. Here, sandwiched between buildings and overlooking busy streets, the presence of goldenrod felt fresh yet familiar. In short, the High Line did not disappoint. And it was while walking the old railway that I began to suspect for the first time that a garden could be a work of art. “To us,” writes horticulturalist Rosie Atkins, the New Perennialists were part of “a movement like the surrealists or the Bauhaus.”3
That gray late-autumn day turned out to be perfect for my first encounter with Oudolf, the most famous of the New Perennialists. Because, above all, the Dutch gardener is famous for his interest in plants that look good when they’re dead. “A key part of Piet’s philosophy,” writes his close collaborator Noel Kingsbury, “is to seek beauty in nature where it has not been sought before. Seed heads, yellowing leaves, and emerging spring shoots will grab his attention as much as a colorful flower—in fact, rather more quickly.”4 Ghostly plant skeletons are essential to the Oudolf aesthetic. “I discover beauty in things that on first sight are not beautiful,” he says. “It is a journey in life to find out what real beauty is—and to notice that it is everywhere.”5 Indeed, his first book with Kingsbury contained a surprising section called “Death,” which, according to Kingsbury, “was quite possibly the first time a garden book had used it as a heading, without being negative about it.”6
In the summer of 2025, almost seven years after visiting the High Line, I mapped out a journey that would begin in Amsterdam and end in Frankfurt. Between those two cities, I would visit a series of gardens designed by or in the spirit of Oudolf, that is, gardens that skirt the edges of order, wildness, and demise. I had only the vaguest of agendas: to contemplate the fleeting beauty of cultivated spaces. What might it mean to think of a garden as art object, I wondered. How should we consider artwork that is essentially unfinishable? What does it mean to make art that spirals out of control or withers if neglected?
These guiding questions stemmed from the hours I’d spent digging, weeding, and planting in the two rain gardens in front of my house. Surrounded by berms and boulders, each depression fills with water during our rare but dramatic Texas storms. Over several hours, rainwater seeps into the aquafer below, rather than rushing off our land and into the city’s sewers. At the base of each “pit,” as my husband puts it, I’ve planted a mass of native pollinators that can withstand both deluge and drought. These attract monarch butterflies as they travel to Mexico. “You’re almost there,” I cheer them on as they feed and rest on my mistflowers.
I began planting in my mid-twenties in the spirit of all my artistic endeavors, including essaying. That’s to say, I undertake both gardening and writing according to instinct, trial, and error. Before I started writing, publishing and, eventually, teaching I had never taken a workshop class; I am an equally untrained plantswoman—for all my botanical successes, uncountable victims have nonetheless ended up on the compost heap. In graduate school, one of my crueler peers called me a dilettante. Though the remark wounded me then, I now wonder if there isn’t something to praise in dilettantism, or rather, more charitably put, in a kind of amateurism that is nonetheless serious when sustained. What I mean is that a person may start as a dilettante—a naïve garden enthusiast, for example—but end as a visionary, who, through sheer repetition, dedication, and successful experimentation ends up radically changing the way we think about our relationship to plants.
As the Dutch designer, Mien Ruys (known as the mother of the modernist garden), stressed over her long career, anyone can grow a garden. Oudolf, for one, started his career and practice by putting plants together in ways that pleased him, rather than according to formal rules. Far more resilient and naturalistic than those of preceding traditions, his are some of the greatest public gardens in the world.
The first garden of my journey is just outside Amsterdam, at the Singer Museum in Laren. I arrive by train to explore and photograph it from all angles. Two Dutch women flag me down to consult the garden map I hold out in front of me—it’s a copy of Oudolf’s original hand-drawn plan, bought in the museum’s gift shop. The women are trying to identify a bushy, blue-flowered shrub, about three feet tall and wide. Cloudlike, with fine leaves, it sports small star-shaped flowers. We consult the plan, but it doesn’t help. The garden has changed. Oudolf’s reproduced sketch no longer corresponds exactly to the garden before us. Plants have migrated, died, or sprung up in unforeseen spots. The Dutch women and I pull out our phones, instead, and determine that the plant in question is amsonia hubrichtii, or Hubricht’s Bluestar. It will reappear in each of the gardens I visit over a two-week period.
Piet Oudolf’s garden at the Singer Laren Museum, June 2025
Soon, I duck inside to look around. Perhaps the museum works will help me see the outdoor art object—the garden—in a different light. Like a palate-cleanser, I tell myself. In a blank corridor on the way to the exhibit entrance, I spot a dandelion apparently growing out of the crease between wall and tiled floor. It’s so lifelike that I think it’s real. I stop to wonder how it came to grow here. Suspicious, I crouch to examine it, summoning all my self-control to avoid touching its leaves and testing its reality. Perplexed, I straighten up and keep walking. Down the hall, I discover a second dandelion, this one with yellowed leaves, spent blooms, and browning fronds. It, too, is utterly, astonishingly lifelike. A small plaque above the plant tells me it’s made of bronze (more shock) and that this is the work of the American artist, Tony Matelli, whose “weeds constitute ‘an art installation that does not at all resemble art.’”7
I am Matelli’s perfect mark. I have reacted to his weeds exactly as he intended: with confusion, surprise, suspicion and, finally, understanding. “I wanted them to be experienced, first, as simple weeds,” he explains.
I didn’t want them to be experienced as a sculpture—I hoped there would be very little art meditation… The Weeds really work this way; I think people initially engage with them as real weeds, which allows them to function in the mind of the viewer as real interlopers, strange and out of place.8
I later learn that Matelli is known for his so-called hyperrealistic sculptures.9 “Hyperrealism has the ability to infuse life into inanimate objects,” he says. “There is an alchemical aspect when materials like bronze, stone, or resin are transmuted into objects that evoke a sense of wonder and awe.”10
Whereas Oudolf’s gardens never stop changing, dying, and regenerating themselves, Matelli’s weed sculptures defy decay by stopping time. Unlike Oudolf’s creations, Matelli’s plants will never die. Ultimately, this is the greatest challenge of thinking of a garden as art: a living work is never fixed or finished; it’s never the same from one day to the next.
I discover more bronze plants sprouting up in odd spots throughout the museum. Eventually, I give in and snap a surreptitious shot of a black-eyed Susan poking up from the base of a stone hollow cast in fiberglass. To my mind a black-eyed Susan is no weed; I’ve sown dozens of them in my rain garden and celebrate their blooms each summer.
“Officially, no photos are allowed, but I’m not looking,” a museum docent says with a laugh. My agitation amuses her and, together, we marvel at the flower’s wilting petals and (now eternal) windblown state.
The Singer Museum’s weeds are not Matelli’s first connection to Oudolf. From 2016 to 2017, Matelli’s sculpture, “Sleepwalker,” found its home on the High Line. The work depicts a balding, middle-aged man in white briefs seemingly somnambulating. The same sculpture made its controversial debut at Wellesley College, Massachusetts, in 2014. In response to “Sleepwalker’s” appearance outdoors on campus, students submitted a petition to the administration, requesting the sculpture be moved indoors. The lifelike figure, students claimed, was a source of fear, anxiety, and distress. On the night of May 20, 2014, vandals defaced “Sleepwalker,” splashing yellow paint over its face, leg, and foot.11 Of the attack on his sculpture, Matelli reflected: “After all that infamy, I felt the work was kind of damaged; my intention was obscured by all that. I felt the High Line offered an opportunity to rehabilitate the work in a sense and let it be seen clearly again.”12
Unlike later bronze specimens, Matelli cast his first series of weeds in PVC. As in Laren, for Abandon, a site-specific installation for the University at Buffalo’s Lightwell Gallery, the plant sculptures sprouted from gallery corners and floor cracks. PVC was a “clever choice” of materials, writes curator Lisa Fishman, “since weeds are known for their ‘plasticity.’”13
But to me, the great seduction and delight of the Laren weeds was my slow realization of their bronzeness and all that the molten and monumental metal implies. To cast a weed in bronze is, at once, funny and mind-blowingly beautiful.
Materials matter. Matelli understands this. He has described his insistence in creating “A Glass of Water” (a sculpture that looks exactly as it sounds—the water glass, two-thirds full, sits atop what appears to be a plain carboard box14) from solid blown glass rather than plastic, as glass fabricators tried to convince him to do. “That work is a lens,” he says.
There’s a poetry to it, and this brings us to the really simple, dumb stuff that art is sometimes, but that actually has a lot of power. We have connections to certain materials and certain efforts. A painted plastic thing does not register the same as a painted stainless steel thing—it just doesn’t. It’s not because it looks different, it’s because we understand the materials differently.15
So, if water blown from glass is a lens, then what is a weed cast in bronze? A monument, I suppose. But to what?
“Gardens are a process.”16 They are, as gardeners like to say, the slowest form of performance art. Though this nugget of wisdom comes up repeatedly in horticultural discussions, despite my attempts, I’ve failed to ascertain its origins. Maybe gardeners have been saying this to one another, nodding solemnly as we do, for as long as humans have been performing. That’s to say, pretty much forever.
Impermanence is on my mind as I follow a series of floating steps through water lilies and reeds. I’ve left Amsterdam, but rather than going straight to Den Haag, I’ve deviated from my planned itinerary and headed far to the Netherlands’ northeast, to visit the gardens of Oudolf’s foremother Ruys, in Dedemsvaart. “Plants find their place,” I read of her marsh garden. Oudolf, too, values collaboration and happenstance over control. In filmed footage, I’ve watched as he walks through his home garden at Hummelo and reaches up to release the fluff of seed heads into the wind, inviting them to germinate where they land.
Plants die – this is inevitable. You can start a garden with a vision, but the best gardeners learn to move with the land, soil, water, and sun. We dance with heat, frost, drought, deluge, and hail. Every garden is both a compromise and a negotiation, at least for the gardener who refuses poisons and resists mechanized irrigation, as I do. What would it mean to try and preserve a garden? “Sometimes I have seen clients with an old Mien Ruys garden,” Oudolf has remarked, “but I cannot see anything remaining there of her…people have to move on, gardens have to change.”17
As for us, the family-garden of three humans and two pets, we have changed, too. Alas, the dog that came with us to Princeton is no more. The cat has grown older and soft around her belly, just like me. The husband continues to play guitar, but his hair has grayed. And Sebastian, that eleven-year-old who came to explore the High Line with me all those years ago, is now far from home and studying to become an architect. He has, as it were, grown like a weed.
Every winter, a perennial garden dies a small death. Each spring, it’s reborn. In an essential way, I think gardens are not only about change but about time itself. “It’s not time passing that’s interesting,” says Matelli, “it’s the effect of time on the human mark that’s important.”18
Months after my return, our Austin rain gardens will undergo their curious December regreening—a result of late-fall rains and cooler temperatures. I know this moment of color and beauty will be short-lived: soon, a January freeze will come, and the blooms will die back. But by February, the bulbs will begin to peek through the soil. Life starts over. Time marches on.
Julija Šukys is Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the award-winning author of Artifact: Encounters with the Campus Shooting Archives (2025), Siberian Exile: Blood, War, and a Granddaughter’s Reckoning (2017), Epistolophilia: Writing the Life of Ona Šimaitė (2012), and Silence is Death: The Life and Work of Tahr Djaout (2007).
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Julija Šukys is Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the award-winning author of Artifact: Encounters with the Campus Shooting Archives (2025), Siberian Exile: Blood, War, and a Granddaughter’s Reckoning (2017), Epistolophilia: Writing the Life of Ona Šimaitė (2012), and Silence is Death: The Life and Work of Tahr Djaout (2007).
2Piet Oudolf and Noel Kingsbury, Hummelo: A Journey Through a Plantsman’s Life. Monacelli, 2015: 155
3Oudolf and Kingsbury 165.
4Oudolf and Kingsbury 202.
5Oudolf and Kingsbury 205.
6Oudolf and Kingsbury 201.
7Matelli qtd. in Lisa Fischman, “Art That Gets Away,” University at Buffalo Art Gallery Overview, ed. Karen Emenhiser. University at Buffalo Art Gallery Research Center in Art + Culture, 2001. 36-38: 37.
8Matelli qtd. in https://marlborougharchive.com/uploads/20300203/1590167614518/tonymatelli_weeds.pdf
9Matelli in Frank Benson and Tony Matelli, “Beyond Realism,” Elevated: Art on the High Line, ed. Cecilia Alamani. Monacelli, 2024. 70-73: 72.
10 Matelli, “Beyond Realism,” 73.
11Cait Munro, “Wellesley College’s Sleepwalker Sculpture Vandalized.” Artnet.com. May 23, 2014; Hili Perlson, “Disputed Scantily Clad ‘Sleepwalker’ Sculpture Comes to the High Line.” Artnet.com. Jan. 7, 2016.
12Matelli, “Beyond Realism,” 71.
13Lisa Fishman, “Tony Matelli: Abandon.” University at Buffalo Art Gallery Research Center in Art + Culture, 1999-2000: 36.
14The box is made from painted polyester fiberglass.
15Matelli, Glass of Water, Verlag der Buchhandlung, 2011: 66.
16The quote, attributed to Mien Ruys, appears on a sign posted in the Tuien Mien Ruys (Mien Ruys Gardens) in Dedemsvaart, Netherlands.
17Oudolf and Kingsbury 140
18Matelli, Glass of Water, 58.
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