Oehme, van Sweden CEO Eric Groft Heads to Authors Night With 'Beyond Bold'

Eric Groft, the CEO of the world-renowned landscape architecture firm Oehme, van Sweden, has been working on projects on the South Fork for going on four decades, but Saturday, August 12, will be his first time appearing at East Hampton Library’s Authors Night, where he will sign his book “Beyond Bold: Inspiration, Collaboration, Evolution.”

Groft is of the second generation at OvS, founded by the late Wolfgang Oehme and James van Sweden, the pioneers of the New American Garden style, which emphasizes native plants and year-round interest. There have been five prior books on the firm’s work, but “Beyond Bold” is the first to put the spotlight on his generation.

Groft himself led the firm’s White House Rose Garden redesign — with the help of Southampton landscape architect Perry Guillot — and other high-profile projects in the nation’s capital, including work on the Federal Reserve campus and the German American Friendship Garden.

“The firm is located on Capitol Hill in Washington, so we know we know the Washington landscape and how to get things approved better than anybody else in town these days,” Groft said during an interview last month.

He’s done residential, commercial, federal and institutional projects nationally and internationally over the course of his career, including the landscapes on a number of Hamptons estates, and said he visits the South Fork once or twice a month to work on current projects as well as consult on prior projects.

“We must have done at least 40 or 50 projects in the last 40 years,” he said of the firm’s work on the East End.

Oehme and van Sweden founded their firm in 1975, and Groft joined them in 1986. Also in the second generation of OvS leaders are Sheila Brady and Lisa Delplace, though of the trio, Groft is the only one still active, as Brady and Delplace have retired. Groft said the new book is about the last 10 to 15 years as the original founders left and he, Brady and Delplace took over.

The name “Beyond Bold” is a nod to the title of the first book about Oehme and van Sweden’s work, “Bold Romantic Gardens: The New World Landscape of Oehme and van Sweden.”

“It really told the story of their partnership and the symbiotic relationship they had,” Groft said of “Bold Romantic Gardens.”

Oehme was born in Germany in 1930 and immigrated to the United States in 1957. “Had his early start in designing gardens in the Baltimore area and had an early career with the Rouse Company that developed the Inner Harbor in Baltimore,” Groft said.

Oehme partnered with Michigan native van Sweden, who studied architecture at the University of Michigan and landscape architecture at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, in the late 1970s.

“Wolfgang had a real passion for American native plants,” Groft said. “You know what garden design was like in most of the middle part of the 20th century. It had the usual cast of characters — azaleas, Rhododendron, boxwoods, yews and bedding plants — that was pretty much the palette of American gardens and landscapes.”

In came Oehme, Groft explained, with his love of American natives, such as black-eyed Susan and switchgrass, and ornamental grasses, which were not being used in the United States then. He said Oehme loved landscapes that could “be read at 60 miles an hour.”

“Wolfgang was planting things in hundreds, if not thousands for maximum impact, that also produced low-maintenance gardens, as well,” he said, and Oehme’s approach, when combined with van Sweden’s background in architecture, balanced the two worlds of landscape and architecture.

“It was termed the New American Garden style … and it really changed the world of landscape architecture and garden design and really led to the current emphasis on the use of native plants,” Groft said.

Native plants have a number of benefits, including being drought resistant, requiring less fertilizer — if any — and needing less maintenance.

“Those were all mantras of the New American Garden style that Jim and Wolfgang put together in the late ’70s,” Groft said.

Groft credited Oehme with making Rudbeckia fulgida, one of the native flowering plants known as black-eyed Susan, a poster child of the native plant movement.

“It was in American meadows and along roadsides just as a volunteer, but it was not used ornamentally as a perennial in this country,” Groft said of the time before Oehme popularized it.

“Other plants like Liatris, Panicum, Echinops, Echinacea were all part of our original palette that we have been using for going on 40 years,” he added.

They chose the title “Beyond Bold” for the new book because it “tells how the second generation kind of took the reins and went beyond the original philosophy of ‘bold,’” Groft said.

He recalled his first exposure to OvS’s work.

“Oehme, van Sweden was a very hot firm when I just got out of architecture school at the University of Virginia,” he said. “In fact, the first big federal project that Jim and Wolfgang did was the Federal Reserve campus right here on the Mall in Washington. And as a student landscape architect, I was brought there because it was new and exciting. No one had ever seen anything like this.”

He learned on that tour that “perennial” means a plant that comes back every year — a fact that even lay gardeners know today. But back then, the word was not part of the nomenclature.

“They weren’t even teaching what a perennial was in landscape architecture schools across the country,” Groft said.

A couple of years later, the opportunity arose to interview with van Sweden for a job.

“We just both hit it off so well and he became my career-long mentor, and Wolfgang was very captivating as well. So I came on board in 1986, and I haven’t regretted a day,” he said.

The new book’s subtitle, “Inspiration, Collaboration, Evolution,” unfolds in the chapters within.

“What inspired us to come work here, how we collaborated during our early years, and how we evolved the firm,” Groft said.

It kicks off in the first chapter with Groft, Brady and Delplace each listing a project that inspired them to work at OvS and then a project that they collaborated with the founders, followed by a specific project each completed after Oehme and van Sweden’s passing.

Within a month of joining the firm, Groft visited Sagaponack for a project for Barbara Slifka, a fashion editor at Harper’s Bazaar — and he continues to work on her garden today. On that same trip, at van Sweden’s encouragement, he also visited Carole and Alex Rosenberg’s Water Mill garden, which was one of van Sweden’s projects.

“You know how beautiful it is in the Hamptons in September — and I was new to the Hamptons,” he recalled. “I was just blown away.”

He said that deep in his soul he felt “this has to be the most beautiful place in the world on this particular day: The sky, the way the grasses and the perennials were moving in the wind coming off of Mecox Bay — it gives me chills to day to go to think about that feeling that I had. It gave me a feeling of, ‘OK, I am home now. This is what I want to do.’”