Hummelo-near the village of the same name in Gelderland in the eastern Netherlands-is visited by thousands of gardeners seeking inspiration each year. People are increasingly aware of how important gardens and plants are to us as humans.An intimate look at the personal garden of the Dutch landscape designer renowned for his plantings at the High Line in New York City, and Lurie Garden at Chicago’s Millennium Park. A lot of my projects - for example, the High Line in New York, which I did with James Corner Field Operations and Diller Scofidio + Renfro - are public, and within such spaces you can see how visitors now engage with the environment. There’s beauty in a seed head in winter, and in the bird feeding on that seed head. Through this method of design, we opened people’s eyes to other aspects of plants beyond flowers. We were interested in how we could use species that’re well suited to their location, and in a naturalistic way.
It allowed us to connect to growers across Europe. The nursery my wife, Anja, and I created at Hummelo in the Netherlands in the 1980s was developed hand in hand with my design work, giving me access to a broader array of plants, specific types of perennials and grasses that had previously been hard to source.
But I was interested in how gardens could be more sensitive to their environment and more spontaneous in their composition. At that time, the way people approached green spaces was highly decorative, labor intensive and formal. Plants and gardening became a healthy obsession for me in the 1970s after I left my parents’ restaurant business and got a job at a nursery. In this image, I’m revisiting the project after the inaugural season to see what’s working and what we need to edit. The result is a combination of plants that provide structure and texture, and flowers such as euphorbia, echium, helichrysum and agapanthus. The Hauser & Wirth gallery’s at its busiest during the summer months, when most Mediterranean species are past their best, so we had to be imaginative about the varieties that we used. A garden isn’t like an exhibition, which is installed for just a few months the plantings must continue to evolve over years.
As a garden designer, I work with plants, not paint, and my process is about composition and how things develop.
Once I have a list of options, I then look at things like structure and seasonality. Whichever site I’m working on - here it’s Hauser & Wirth’s new gallery in Minorca, Spain - I first learn about what palette of species will grow well in that climate and soil.
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