Meeting the Netherlanders I: Plants, Places, People

In late June, I left my patch of Canadian woodland far behind to travel overseas to the Netherlands and Germany. I was a gardener on a mission to meet some of the luminaries of contemporary Dutch planting design and explore their gardens and nurseries in my version of a midsummer night’s dream.

Above all else, this trip was about the chance to again meet visionary Dutch planting designer, Piet Oudolf on his home turf – and to participate in a planting design workshop led by Piet and his writerly collaborator, Dr. Noel Kingsbury at the hallowed Oudolf private garden in Hummelo.

I’d spent a couple months beforehand utterly absorbed in the duo’s latest book, ‘Planting: A New Perspective’ to catch up with the expanding frontiers of new perennial design. Though in a greater sense, this journey had been years in the making.

The one-day workshop kicked off a week-long Gardens Illustrated tour to visit gardens of the Dutch Northern Provincess, led by the erudite Noel and his effusive wife, Jo Elliott.

Before the trip was over,  I’d also find myself traipsing around Rotterdam in the south for yet another slice of the Dutch experience.

I’d planned it all as something of a personal dare – but that’s the great thing about travel. You never know what awaits on the other side. This post is the first in a series about the species of people, revelations, plants, and wonderment I encountered along the way.

Atypical Dutch

For me, a trip to the Netherlands feels like time travel. As if I’ve been jet-propelled into some kind of advanced civilization coexisting in a parallel dimension with our own.

The signs are everywhere: in the bold, diamond-cut modern architecture,  the elegant canals and ancient towers, the smart shops, the never ending parade of bicyclists, the stylish citizenry, the church bells, the mustard soup, fresh herring and beer – and most definitely in their sublimely realized gardens.

Like the Brits, the Dutch are a nation of gardeners: from tidy front yards with fastidiously-groomed topiary to plant-bedecked houseboats parked up the canals. And like the neon-pink windows that light up city sidestreets at night, their horticultural tastes run far to the wild side as well.

Each time, I quizzed the locals about any of these cultural marvels, they’d invariably respond using the catch-all phrase, “Ah, yes. Typical Dutch.” From what I observed, they are anything but.

Canuck Makes Landfall

Arriving in Amsterdam, my first move was to hop on a high-speed train to southern Germany – stopping briefly in Utrecht where I took some time to wander over the canals into the old town directly into the reverie of a Saturday morning flower market. Wave after wave of beautiful and unusual specimens exquisitely presented.

I planned to shake off the jet lag and set the tone for my journey with a trip to Hermannshof, the botanical trial garden in Weinheim, considered to be Germany’s absolute benchmark for naturalistic planting design.

Saddled on a forested slope overlooking the Rhine Valley and encircled by a wandering stone wall in the old village, Hermanshoff exists in a climactic sweet spot that enables them to cultivate an astonishing diversity of habitats and perennial plantings – from steppe to prairie to dry mediterranean.

The gardens themselves are a revelation to explore with winding paths cut deep into each habitat – enabling you to immerse yourself utterly in the profusion of each plant universe: an exemplary fusion of ecological experimentation and aesthetics all rolled into one. Serious learning packed into this visit with full disclosure to come.

Landschaftpark: Mindblowën

Returning to the Netherlands, I stopped off in the somewhat drab city of Duisburg to see Landschaftpark, an exceedingly strange and haunting industrial wasteland of abandoned factories and skeletal machinery, half-reclaimed by nature. Constructed on a planetary scale, the park is like Fritz Lang’s Metropolis swallowed up by forest and rust. It’s now being reborn with the building of ingenious galleries and performance spaces forged from the wreckage.

My Day with Piet Oudolf

From there, I had a date with destiny to keep in Hummelo. One can never predict these things. But without a doubt, the design workshop proved to be a life-changing kind of day.

It’s one thing to read the books and visit the gardens, it’s quite another to have an extended visitation with the authors themselves – and get a real sense of them as individuals, thinkers, and creative minds in the very place where the whole New Perennial movement first took root.

I’d been fortunate to get to know Piet a bit before the event itself – through the strange miracle of social media. He actually searched me out – having seen from Facebook posts between mutual friends how passionate I am about their work. It’s not something he spends a lot of time on and restricts himself to a handful of friends with whom he shares a stream of sublime photographs and handheld home movies of his evolving gardens.

So unlike my first trip to Hummelo three years earlier, this time I was not quite so starstruck to meet my design hero incarnate. This was good – because from the moment of arrival, I was ready to simply engage and Piet treated me with the chatty warmth of an old friend. It’s rare enough in life to meet a true visionary, but Piet is something even rarer – a man of great modesty, depth, and sly humour, who clearly takes real joy in inspiring others to also explore these new frontiers.

A Higher Plane

Of all the gardens I saw in my dutch travels, Hummelo vibrated on something of a higher plane. It was particularly interesting to view it in such detail at the start of July – just as summer proper was set to explode.

It was at a point when you could still make out something of the underlying design structure of the plantings themselves – although not easily, because the lines between what is planned, intermingled and seeded have mostly been erased by intention and time. It helped to have Piet on hand to explain how various parts of his garden had come into being and to tell the story of particular prize plants and new selections.

The workshop also presented an initial encounter to meet the rest of the group – most of whom would continue with Noel’s tour of the Dutch Northern Provinces. It was quite a global gathering with perhaps around 30 designers and gardeners drawn from as far away as New Zealand, Argentina, Scandinavia, the U.S. and all points Europe – I was the lone Canadian. Myself and Adam Woodruff, a tremendous fan of Piet’s work and gifted American planting designer in his own right, were the only men in the group. Already pals on Facebook, we became friends in reality straight away.

The Grand Tour Begins

While I’m something of a travel purist who prefers to go solo, I was pleasantly surprised by the camaraderie of the small group travel experience. It helped that we were all bonded by the common theme of plants, design, and the sublime. And a core group of ten Argentinean landscape designers, all women, gave the proceedings a wonderfully surreal air. Like something out of an Almodovar movie, they embraced each new garden like a secret lover – with wandering eyes, parted lips, knee-high leather riding boots, and a fiery intensity.

More often than not leaping the language barrier, we always found something to talk about – beginning right after the remarkable workshop on the long bus ride north to the 12th century university town of Gröningen, which is where the next post about this remarkable adventure begins.