An old adage says the best way to select plants for your garden is to look at the gardens that surround you, and that is sound advice. Usually what grows well in your neighbor’s yard will grow well in yours—the plants are often facing similar conditions in terms of soil and climate, as well as in terms of pests and diseases, so keeping up with the Joneses may not be a bad thing horticulturally.
That said, a newly released book, Gardens Under Big Skies: Reimagining Outdoor Space the Dutch Way, has me peering into backyards thousands of miles away (and often below sea level, as much of the landscape of the Netherlands is engineered and therefore well below the elevation of the Berkshires) for ideas not only about design, but also about plants that might belong in my garden. It is not surprising that the Dutch exert a big influence over plant selection. The trend began with the tulip and bulb craze centuries ago, and continues today with a new kind of Dutch import—Dutch landscape designers and plantspeople such as Piet Oudolf, Henk Gerritson, and Mien Ruys, who advocate for the beauty of American grasses and prairie perennials. Many of the varieties and species that are a part of the New Wave of gardening in America were selected by Dutch designers, who managed to show us the beauty of what we take for granted along our local roadsides.
This book certainly celebrates these plants, from Joe Pye weed and the willow-leaved sunflower to the asters that fill New England roadsides with their colorful composite flowers in the fall. After reading this book, I cannot wait to divide my Helianthus salicifolius and use divisions of this ten-foot tall perennial to screen a view and to have its willowy, soft green leaves backlit by the evening sun, as it is in the garden of Arjan Boekel. Throughout the book, Dutch designers show us how the artful use of these American natives in the managed landscape can create gardens that seem to merge back into the surrounding ecosystem.
Even the non-native bulbs that we associate with the sixteenth century Netherlands and that many have come to consider staid can be used to such effect. The landscape designer Jacquelyn van der Kloet plants tulips, daffodils, and grape hyacinths in a seemingly haphazard manner in her garden amongst cranesbills and other stalwart perennials and gets these bulbs to display their wilder nature. Many of the gardens in this book seem to gently merge back into nature, and this does not seem to be a bad design goal in the Netherlands or here in the Berkshires. And it is certainly one that aligns with our present-day desire to garden in an environmentally sound manner.
But this book proves something else, perhaps a corollary but one that for me was completely unexpected; it provides us with a design paradigm in which these plants not only align with nature, but also are good civil servants. In garden after garden, these plants meet our aesthetic needs and address our environmental goals while also providing spaces for living and entertaining. These gardens manage to create contained spaces at the same time as they connect outwardly. They contain and connect. The term garden is derived from a word for contained space, and for centuries, gardens were meant to keep the wild out, or at bay, if you will. But the Dutch have managed to bring nature in close, with artful architecture and design that allow these plants to inhabit space that feels ordered and safe—creating spaces that are inwardly secure and outwardly connected.
The Dutch do not enjoy the same mountain views that we do—the largest hills in their country would not even cause a local Berkshire bicyclist to catch their breath—but they use sky the way we use mountains. Their big blue sky serves as a backdrop to gardens to connect back to the world around them, the way a glimpse of a mountains tells us we are home in the Berkshires.
This idea of focusing both inwardly and outwardly provides a balance to the gardens that appear in this book, and tells us how to create gardens that connect to the broader landscape. Who knew that flatlanders had lessons for us mountain goats on how to approach our surrounding landscape? But I guess looking into the garden of any neighbor, near or far, is bound to teach us something.
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A gardener grows through observation, experimentation, and learning from the failures, triumphs, and hard work of oneself and others. In this sense, all gardeners are self-taught, while at the same time intrinsically connected to a tradition and a community that finds satisfaction through working the soil and sharing their experiences with one another. This column explores those relationships and how we learn about the world around us from plants and our fellow gardeners.
