A garden designed by Piet Oudolf (Haarlem, 1944) welcomes visitors to Chillida Leku. The internationally renowned Dutch landscape architect has created a work that serves as a prelude to the sculptures of Eduardo Chillida and the Zabalaga farmhouse. For Oudolf, this project has meant the enormous challenge of enhancing such a unique place without interfering with Chillida's work. For this reason, he intervenes in one of the fundamental points of the museum: the entrance that welcomes its visitors. Piet Oudolf's intervention consists of the design of two differentiated spaces: Woodland border and Perennial border.

Perennial border presents a different atmosphere to the other. This type of planting is more representative of Piet Oudolf's work. The Dutch artist faces the garden as a blank canvas, as if it were a painting. He starts from a palette composed of different plants where he alternates herbs and perennials, thus playing with the variation of different textures, shapes and colours. The plants used are originally wild, which imprints spontaneity and naturalness on the landscape. Amsonia hubritchii and salicifolia, Echinacea pallida, Echinops Veitch Blue, Eryngium Big Blue, the enormous Eupatorium Riesenschirm, the Persicarias, Lysimachias and Molinias are some of the extraordinary varieties selected by Piet Oudolf. 

This work undergoes a dynamic process, in continuous transformation, and is beautiful at any time of the year. In spring, greens predominate, while summer is the most flowery season, characterised by an explosion of intense colours. On the other hand, during autumn and winter, brown tones predominate above all. Piet Oudolf assures us that beauty lies in unimaginable things: it is also found in ugliness, death and decomposition. His artistic process is a constant search for true beauty that is found in the struggle between the beautiful and the unbeautiful, in seemingly dead nature, in the unexpected.