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How to grow a garden

The other week m cheerily called ‘Hallo!’ from her first floor window to a passerby who, by chance, happened to have slept in the very same bedroom as a child. Our house had belonged to her mother, and the raised bed sleepers in the back garden had been placed by her father decades earlier. For the three growing seasons the house has been ours the decayed sleepers and an arch sat like oversized furniture making the space feel unfairly small, exacerbated further each spring as nature trickled into a torrent of unruly green.

Since January M and I have been in the back courtyard most weekends. While dyschronia places me in late summer I happily accept the reality that we’re only mid-Spring. In reconfiguring the garden, our wishes were simple – a sense of spaciousness, low maintenance planting, easy access to the garage, and areas for lounging, barbecuing and play. And unlike other DIY projects undertaken in the house, nature’s impermanence has made for a liberating playground.

Noting here some useful resources and lessons learned through the process:

How to select plants

  • Book Planting the Natural Garden by Piet Oudolf & Henk Gerritsen
    This book offers pretty comprehensive detailing of Oudolf and Gerritsen’s favourite perennial plants and grasses, along with some planting theme suggestions and spacing recommendations. I read it like a novel and revered it like a bible, slowly refining a final selection of plants for our space. The ’New Perennial’ or ‘Dutch Wave’ movement that Oudolf is renowned for choreographs plants and grasses, taking into consideration their bloom period, season by season structure, colour and height to create a display that’s interesting in every season.
  • Gardener Erik Funneman
    Erik was one of several gardeners available for speed dating sessions as part of the Utrecht Botanic Gardens voorjaarsweekend program. With some luck, we were able to get some guidance from him on plant selection, with recommendations to limit variety of species for greater impact and substitute some current selections for close variants that were lower maintenance. I particularly like the sculptural elements in his work – whether built construction or via plant selection and combination.

Where to source them (and other plant-related things)

  • Nurseries Plantwerk, van Houtem, and de Hessenhof
    In hindsight, though Planting the Natural Garden was an essential primer, I realise now that it is more practical to have a base knowledge of plants which can then be drawn on to select from the growing lists of one or two preferred nurseries – making for simple procurement and confidence in quality. Buying directly from nurseries, as opposed to garden centres, provides better insight regarding the origins of your plants. Both organically grown and native plants contribute to biodiversity through improved soil quality and by supporting pollinators, respectively.
  • Bases and toppers Biokultura and Pokon
    Biokultura is run by Kwekerij van Houtem and produces high-quality organic potting soil, garden soil and compost. We filtered our existing soil, which tested neutral and already had a decent ecosystem of worms and bugs, and mixed it with some of Biokultura’s garden soil to improve it a little more. It has barely rained since our plants went in the ground, so Pokon’s mulch has been extremely helpful in retaining moisture (and minimising weeds).
  • Tuinderijen Eykenstein and Amelis’Hof
    In Utrecht the distance between the city centre and its outer boundaries is small, making it possible to live in urban areas and take a short cycle to buy organic fruit, veg and flowers directly from small growers. This is a small pleasure, that I hope to make more of a practice – a beautiful cycle for fresh groceries making for a slow Saturday morning.

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Oudolf Field

We have wanted to visit Oudolf Field for awhile and last weekend made it happen. During lockdown we’d primed ourselves with Five Seasons: The Gardens of Piet Oudolf, but nothing compares to the real thing.

The Oudolf Field is masterfully planted, taking into account colour, shape, texture and height to frame nature as both sculpture and theatrical performance. Time congeals in the garden, as if its entrance is a portal to an over-cranked film. Bodies parade in slow motion to find every vantage point and appreciate every contrast. The best part is that nature takes no pause. I look forward to returning in autumn, winter and spring.

Over the course of his gardening practice, Piet Oudolf has developed an informal, but intricately detailed, approach to planning. Colour and pattern, seemingly haphazard, enables an agility in application. His hand-drawn sketches are beautiful objects in their own right, appealing to any graphic designer that is seduced by intelligent, orderly systems.

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Toward a Common Practice—Chapter 2: Deceleration (or) Observations on the feeling of the beautiful and the sublime

This chapter explores walking as a method of deceleration; it traces the historical significance of walking for aesthetic pleasure; discusses examples of deceleration in art practice and contemporary culture; it interprets the ‘slow’ nature of walking; and finally, explains the use of digression and association as a strategy within the research.

I can only meditate when walking, when I stop I cease to think. My mind only works with my legs.

John Jacques Rousseau (1)

The intentional act of walking for aesthetic pleasure has a specific history within Western culture, beginning with ‘the wilful wanderer’ in the eighteenth century. Literary individuals sought to align themselves with the Sophists and Peripatetic school of Ancient Greece, and philosophical reflections on the intellectual benefits of walking were emerging from Burke, Kant and Rousseau (2). From the outset this particular type of walking was rooted in privilege. It is not the history of ‘the tramps, the hobos, the vagrants, the dispossessed, the fugitives, the harmed and the jobless’ (3). Being freely chosen, it was mostly undertaken by a healthy, white, educated male of a certain social and financial standing that permitted reasonable free time, access and safety.

The transformation of the private garden from ‘the formal and highly structured, to the informal and naturalistic’ simultaneously fostered the democratisation of walking practices (4). The medieval garden was situated within a walled fortress in which occupants reclined, in conversation or listening to music. The Renaissance and Baroque gardens complemented safer, more palatial residences that encouraged sitting and walking, however, the order and geometry imposed on the landscape promoted formality rather than autonomous experience. In the eighteenth century, walls were substituted for the ha-ha, an inconspicuous ditch marking the perimeter of the property and enabling views of the countryside beyond. Winding paths were introduced and sculpture was curtailed – ‘the subject of gardens was becoming nature itself’ known as the Jardin Anglais (5). Notably, the burgeoning interest in nature that empowered unprecedented physical and mental freedoms coincided with the onset of the industrial revolution. And while it began as an aristocratic preoccupation, its inherent accessibility made it popular amongst the working class too.

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