Few tourists think to visit Groningen, the northernmost capital of the Netherlands.
My tattered copy ofLonely Planet lists the main local activity in the sparsely populated region as wadlopen ormud-walking out in the open flats of the North Sea.They also mention something about pig farms.
From what I saw, they’re missing out.
Because Groningen also happens to be an ideal launchpad from which to explore an alternate universe of garden design. And that’s exactly what we set out to do last July on the Gardens Illustrated Tour of the Dutch Northern Provinces led by English garden writer, Dr. Nöel Kingsbury and his wife, Jo Elliott.
Fresh from the planting design workshop at Hummelo with Piet Oudolf and Nöel, we arrived in Gröningen – a bustling capital of 180,000 with a medieval city-centre lit up by canals, gabled brick houses, winding cobblestone lanes and some daringly modern buildings thrown in the mix.
Amongst other things, the city is home to one of the Netherland’s oldest universities, dating from 1604, so there’s a perpetual flow of student life cascading into the streets by day and the bars by night.
And with more bicycles per capita than anywhere else in Northern Europe, Groningen not only rocks, it literally rolls. With nary a pig in sight.
More than Mud Walking
Our itinerary for the week was all arranged; each morning after breakfast, we’d set off by private bus from the chic Asgard Hotel into the pancake-flat sea of green farmland.
As the scenery whizzed by (often with vast untamed colonies of the notorious Giant Hogweed lurking by the roadside, which no one seemed terribly bothered about), Noel regaled us from the front of the bus with stories, theories, and lessons in dutch history.
Having read practically all his books on garden design, it was a treat to hear the voice behind the page. And in terms of plant knowledge, Noel is the übernerd.
He dubbed our group, “the global gardeners” and it was fascinating to get to know such an individualistic collection of fellow voyagers, some of whom you can see below.
Eventually, we’d arrive at our destination of the day: a series of quite fantastical gardens and boutique plant nurseries – dotted about like so many oases amidst the clustered northern provinces of Groningen, Drenthe and Friesland.
Apparently some decades earlier, a wave of idealistic hippies had travelled north to escape the urban south and get land on the cheap. With space to experiment, some of these hippies became extraordinary plantsmen and ended up creating some astonishingly imaginative gardens along the way.
They chose exceedingly well; the region offers optimal growing conditions with a high water table, fast-draining sandy soil, temperate climate, and an incredibly long growing season – ideal for a wide cross-section of moisture-loving perennials and grasses.
This being the Netherlands, it seems that every little town and village along the way seems to share this love of well-designed spaces for all things growing.
Other Green Worlds
We tracked this current of creativity down to the plant nurseries themselves – destinations in their own right with superbly realized show gardens, featuring everything from highly-manicured formal designs to prairie meadows gone exquisitely wild.
I’ve seen the same thing here in North America but seldom taken to such extremes.It’s all to demonstrate what’s possible – to provide the plants, ideas and inspiration for DIY gardeners.
Our first stop was at Kwekerij De Kleine Plantage, a show garden/nursery, which presented a series of modern sculptures sited through an intricately hedged corridor of garden rooms – each opening up into its own little green world.
Keep walking and you enter a connoisseur’s dream nursery filled with startlingly complete collections of keystone New Perennial species like Astrantia, Thalictrum and Persicaria – many with European cultivars and hybrids I was seeing for the first time.
In contrast, the wild-edged garden & nursery of Henk and Dori Jacobsin Drentheinvites you to lose yourself down a series of twisting paths in artful and immense plantings that open out onto a serene pond.
Plantsman Henk was a terrific source for growing insights as we discussed everything from how to create your own Thalictrum hybrids to how to propagate fiddly heleniums (they’re home to one of the Dutch national collections.)
I also learned from their no-nonsense approach to plant selection. If a given species was not thriving in the garden, out it would go – to be replaced by something more habitat-friendly.
Collectors andCollections
‘Lianne’s Siergrassen’ orprairie garden nursery starts out with their encyclopaedic Dutch collection of ornamental grasses leading out to a wide open meadow planting. You can see all the grasses set in context as well as experimental plantings by noted perennial designer Michael King. They also house an extensive plant nursery with over 300 species of grasses.
Some of the gardens are collector’s paradises in their own right like Andres Bierling and his echinacea collection including nearly every hybrid known to mankind. But you’d also get the chance to see how things work in a garden setting proper as with the soul-stirring water gardens at Tuinfleur Oostwold.
Garden as Model and Muse
We visited the country garden of Ton ter Linden and his partner, Gert Tabak to catch up with a seminal figure in the Dutch Wave planting design movement of the 1980s (along with Piet Oudolf, Henk Gerritsen and others).
Like a Dutch Monet, Ton ter Linden creates highly-complex impressionistic plantings, which ultimately serve as subject matter for his pastel drawings. His current garden is framed intimately on a rise of land with a sunken pond at its centre – gazing out to a tableau of farmer’s fields vanishing into the far horizon.
Ton terLinden approaches the actual craft of gardening quite differently than any of his contemporaries. Where others add, he subtracts – using a long metal weeding fork –shaped like a fire poker – to edit his perennial plantings, removing plants with pinpoint precision according to his painter’s eye.
It’s a high-maintenance garden design method taken to an artistic extreme. He quite rightly asks, why should gardening simply be about low-maintenance? He glories in the process of constant creation and then letting things happen.
Capturing Light
By comparison, Jaap de Vries is a dutch home gardener with a stylish rural B&B who captures his self-designed perennial meadow through the lens of a digital camera. A few of us got to know Jaap before the trip through thehighly evocative imageshe regularly posts to an army of Facebook followers.
The photos below show his garden in the full radiance of late summer – taken by Jaap himself.
His professional background is in theatre stagecraft and it shows in Jaap’s attention to texture, form and especially light. His naturalistic meadow is still quite young – only four years old – and from the thematic usage of grasses like the feathery Stipa tenuissima, one can clearly see the influence of Hermannshof, the seminal german naturalistic botanical garden directed by Cassian Schmidt.
There are also strong hints of Oudolf in the New Perennial plant selection and the integrated placement of grasses and clumped perennials in a kind of matrix. Clearly, Jaap has studied the masters well – and I could keenly relate to his enthusiasm and marvel at his ambition.
It Takes a Village
After absorbing so many individual gardens, it was refreshing to spend an entire day with urbane garden designer Nico Kloppenborg whose work flows in and around the elegant homes of the historic village of Mantgum.
Every one of his gardens in the community was like a design puzzle solved in some ingenious fashion – starting with his own home dramatically set right beside the local churchyard and cemetery.
His back garden opens onto a terrace which abruptly drops down a steep slope to the rest of the garden below. But Nico turns the change in elevation to his advantage by stepping down the entire space into a series of gravel switchbacks framed by a zig-zag hedge and hidden flower borders.
At the bottom, he has arranged a flat, tranquil area for sitting – with standalone perennials randomly planted in loose shale for a different kind of naturalistic effect.
Nico also sets subtle pieces of sculpture right into his plantings – cast metal birds and small bronzes of huddled men in raincoats perched on the top of a stake.
This geometric hedging and deft shrub work is a definite theme in Nico’s work. In a nearby client garden, he’d slightly angled the topline of a long hedge to create the illusion that it was receding into the distance.
In the sideyard of yet another home, he braided together the branches of a lime hedge to create an interwoven sculpture, which is revealed when the leaves fall away in winter.
A witty man of operatic flourishes, Nico also led us on a field trip out to the forest of the Eco-cathedral – a kind of post-nuclear sculpture park made out of waste building material.
The site is the brainchild of Louis Le Roy who began building it in an empty meadow in the early 70s right up until his death in 2012. He envisioned it as a way to experiment with the concept of space and time in a natural setting. Many others have joined in on the project and the Eco-cathedral continues to evolve as a kind of spiritual home for the Dutch environmental movement – slated for completion in the year 3000.
Something Wicked this Way Comes
Perhaps every great garden is the fruit of obsession – healthy or otherwise. We encountered the most bizarre garden of the trip at a remote country estate known as Landhuis Oosterhouw – the home of designer, Hans Christian Klasema, who bore an uncanny resemblanc to Vincent Van Gogh.
His enormous garden, set around an old mansion was a study in eccentricity run deep, seemingly cultivated over lifetimes of labour. It was both arch formal with precisely-mannered hedges combined with rawer vegetation tipped on the edge of chaos.
Mr. Klasema brought out the vintage crystal and linens for an exquisitely catered lunch and spoke with cryptic charm of a monk who arrived at the house one day – and never left.
This was a place with oddities abounding. A cinder-black straw angel appears to have divebombed into the roof of the greenhouse and then been left abandoned to swing like a noose in the dark.
The quiet ponds and curving pathways lined with mosses hinted at a Japanese aesthetic – leading all the way back to a serpentine stream crossed by a bridge and a series of raft-sized wooden steps set through a forest woodland.
The house itself existed in a pure time warp with few signs of the modern world and it was all eerily delightful.
Gezellig in Groningen
If you ever make it to the Netherlands, you’re bound to hear the word ‘Gezellig’. A beast to pronounce, it describes the state of serenity that comes with things being right in the world – but it’s famously untranslatable.
It’s pretty much how I felt in Groningen almost every time I left the hotel.
We experienced it vividly on our very last day as we did a walking tour to see some special gardens in Gröningen itself.
The Hortus Botanical Gardens were the least interesting although they had an unexpectedly interesting Chinese moon garden. I was much more intrigued by the formal stone pools, statues and pathways of theMuseum de Buitenplaats pictured below.
We also paid a visit to one of the local alms-houses – set up in a row around a central courtyard. They’re now converted into co-op retirement homes allowing people to have their own space and yet live together. Truly an enlightened approach to social care.
Later in the afternoon, we were invited behind the gate of a centuries-old private home to view a family garden and tour their house of antiquities.
We gathered in a large dining room for an oddly comforting and slightly soggy buffet of Dutch-style Chinese food – one last evening saddled with the knowledge that we would be soon going our separate ways.
Our final grace note on the drive back to Amsterdam was to visit the garden of Mien Ruys in Dedemsvaart – the matriarch of dutch modern garden design who lived to 95 years old. It’s a place of pilgrimage with 30 model gardens – each exploring a different facet of design possibility.
Getting back to Schippol airport, the goodbyes came hard as the members of our group returned to their respective corners of the world. Many of us remain in touch through a Facebook group called Dutch Dreams which also welcomes curious garden and design buffs from wherever.
For my part, I quickly returned to solo travel mode with one final mission on my Netherlands odyssey. I caught the next train south to Rotterdam for a kind of personal master class in planting design, en route to see some of Piet Oudolf’s most recent public projects with my own eyes.
Sometimes, there’s just no going home until you’re good and ready.
