In the first few minutes of the documentary Five Seasons: The Gardens of Piet Oudolf, the renowned landscape designer guides visitors around the gardens at his home in Hummelo, Netherlands. When he alerts them a camera’s lurking about, someone asks, “Is he following you?” Oudolf replies, “I’m leading him.”

That’s a perfect way to frame director Thomas Piper’s film, now playing in New York and expanding to other North American cities this summer. Five Seasons is a loving, reverential work that tags along with Oudolf for a year, from one fall to the next, and wonderfully captures a man whose imposing physical presence belies a gentle, introspective spirit and boundless wonder for the world’s flora. (He could easily have walked out of an Ingmar Bergman film.) Together, we explore American wildernesses and European gardens; visit some of his public landscape masterpieces, including New York’s Battery Gardens and High Line and the Lurie Garden at Millennium Park in Chicago; and watch as he designs the Hauser & Wirth’s Durslade Farm site in Bruton, England, then experience it as a functional public space.