Dutch Planting Styles

Tulips and Other Cultivars

• Each year, the legendary gardens at Keukenhof, an hour outside Amsterdam, open to the public for eight weeks in the spring. The castle grounds host nearly a million visitors who ogle the 7 million tulip bulbs and other formal and informal gardens on display. Keukenhof shows the classic and decorative flowerbeds that mass one color, one cultivar, contrasting colors or graduated sizes of tulips within careful borders. It also creates a themed display annually, completely made of bright spring flowers that form a picture, visible at a distance, fragrant and colorful up close. The geometric plantings of colorful annuals are widely copied in municipal parks, public spaces, garden plots and museum grounds. Keukenhof might create the onion domes of St. Petersburg in tulips and hyacinths. A city using the planting style might landscape its street median with solid beds of bright red or yellow tulips, both styles expressions on the same exuberant spectrum.

New Perennial Movement

• Mien Ruys' life spanned almost the entire 20th century and her inventive style profoundly influenced the Dutch gardenscaping seen today. Ruys developed an oblique geometric design to shape her gardens, setting paths and plantings at angles to houses. Even when her paths straightened out and her plots became squared and more traditional, she continued to evolve a signature style -- perennial borders. Ruys used perennials as the bones of a spare landscape that also incorporated unexpected materials like railroad ties and recycled plastic. Her model gardens, on display in the Netherlands, feature a deck of plastic platforms meandering through a heavily planted marsh, paver paths made of pebbles set in stone tiles, extreme simplicity, lots of water features and ornamental grasses. Ruys' work was a departure from the vivid plots of annuals that typically characterized gardens in the Netherlands.

Natural Planting Style

• Piet Oudolf is one of the most well-known and sought after garden landscapers working today. The Dutch landscape architect's high-profile gardens, like the grounds of Battery Park City in Lower Manhattan and the High Line, a reclaimed old railway trestle turned park in the middle of New York City, have spread his gospel worldwide. Oudolf propagates many of his own plants in his own nursery and blends acres of grasses and non-invasive perennials, juxtaposes plants from a natural landscape with unexpected but compatible cultivars, uses huge drifts of a single plant to create a powerful mood and threads them with irregular plantings for more whimsical moments. He might use a formal clipped hedge carefully positioned in a casual natural setting. Oudolf's design for the Toronto Botanical Garden is a prairie of wildflowers and grasses leading up to a building heavily overgrown by climbing vines that are green in summer, ruby red in October, and a twisted brown tapestry of lines in winter.