What's up everyone? Welcome back to the Epic Gardening Podcast. Today, exciting week ahead.

I'm joined by Tom Piper, who is the award-winning director of the film Five Seasons, which profiles Pete O'Dolf, a world-renowned Dutch garden designer and author.

So going to be a very exciting week, I don't know as much as I wish I knew about this world of gardening, landscape design,

garden design, using perennials in beautiful ways.

As you guys know, I'm much more on the edible side of life but that's why I have people like

Tom on so Tom thanks for coming on and I thought maybe we could start out with Pete's

biography kind of who he is. Sure yeah thanks Kevin for having me well. I should also say I mean I always make this confession but I

Wasn't a gardener before I started this project so so maybe we're both coming from the same place in terms of perennials and garden design.

But Pete is very much, you know, I think he's sort of held in highest regard or greatest celebrity maybe is the best way to put it among

garden designers working today.

He often sort of gets the euphemism, the rock star of gardening because he seems to inspire a pretty frenzied response

which you know probably owes a lot to to the excitement around the way he's been designing gardens.

His personal story, I mean he for a long time ran a nursery in Holland where he's from

and the nursery was really famous or among sort of plant people.

It was really well known for being a place where you could get unusual plants. for growing the things that weren't typically seen at least at that time in gardens.

And he kind of built his reputation on that and I think the reputation stems from being someone who has just

You know people often say he knows more about plants than anyone else I mean at least plants in the way that he's using them and for the designs that style sort of naturalistic planting design. And then he sort of wound down the nursery business as his design business started to take off.

And but it's still, you know, as'll say himself it took a long time I mean the

nursery was going for 15 years or so and then and it took a while to sort of get the design business going and it's been something that I think he's

fortunate and I think he feels very lucky that it's sort of later in life.

He's had this real explosion in terms of recognition

for his work and then the kinds of projects

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