Here is a correspondence that caught me by surprise: The films of Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, and the gardens of Dutch landscape designer Piet Oudolf. What brings the two together is a sense of beauty that is highly conceptual and yet achieves the illusion of being aleatory or accidental. The impulse here is to recreate those moments when beauty just happens, when it's brought together by forces that have no designer or goal. It is these experiences that make us mystical. We try to see in the aleatory a pattern or a communication from that other side that the vitalists of old believed life popped out from. But there is no such thing, no other side. The moment just happened. And it happened to you. As a consequence, such moments are deeply personal. The mystical that derails can only be the mistake of seeing the total in what is transitory. And when science does see the whole in the local, it can't help but have the nimbus of the mystical. Bring these together, and you have those Russian films by Tarkovsky and those Dutch gardens by Oudolf.

What you actually find behind the gardens by Oudolf is Oudolf, the designer. He has done a trick that the eye and camera of Tarkovsky also mastered. Though having squeezed out the accidental from his works, Oudolf reproduces it by understanding the nature of wildness. The best way I can explain this illusion is if you think of a musician who can compose tunes out of wind chimes without ever losing the impression that the instruments, the suspended metal rods, are set into motion by a wind that has come from who knows where and is going to lord knows where.

There is a moment in Five Seasons: The Gardens of Piet Oudolf—which is short (75 minutes) and is beautiful because Oudolf's gardens are beautiful (he designed garden on Manhattan's High Line park)—when Oudolf makes comments about climate change. He is not certain that his work can make a difference at that scale. His gardens may not save the world, but they surely saved him. But he is wrong here. And to explain why, I have to point out the work of local artist Sarah Bergmann, who happens to be a Dutch American. By way of her Pollinator Pathway project, she has reached the conclusion that the future of urban humanity, and therefore humanity as a whole, is a matter of reforming our conception of design. It must not be seen as the opposite of the natural. Design and the natural, art and the aleatory, must become one. This is in Tarkovsky's films. This is in Oudolf's gardens.