After 54-year-old plantswoman Dirkje Boer died of cancer in 2002, her garden sank into grief along with her husband and three sons. The two and a half acres of flowers she had cultivated against the backdrop of surrounding dairy farms in the village of Dijkerhoek (about an hour and a half east of Amsterdam by car) quickly got overtaken by weeds. By the time Dutch-born landscape architect Ronald van der Hilst saw the property, its condition mirrored her surviving family members’: “It was like a bomb had exploded,” he told Architectural Digest.
Touring the property with widower Willem Boer, Antwerp-based Van der Hilst saw the challenge: “He cared deeply about gardens, but this place was her world.” Van der Hilst realized the project would need to honor Dirkje Boer’s memory by resurrecting the idea of her garden–but with a low-maintenance landscape that could largely take care of itself.
The result is a dreamy green landscape that manages to simultaneously evoke nostalgia and hope. Even without Dirkje’s beloved roses and delphiniums, the garden changes color dramatically with every season. Here’s how:
Above: For van der Hilst, the most exciting challenge of any landscaping project is to create the unexpected. Seeking inspiration after meeting Willem Boer, he returned to Antwerp and started to draw ideas while listening to music.
Listening to Mahler’s Sixth Symphony, with its “strong rhythmic structure,” inspired the landscape architect to create a two-tiered reflecting pool shaped like a cross to anchor the center of the garden.
Above: Van der Hilst interplanted deep pink echinacea with a drift of frothy perennial grasses to add color to a low, undulating hedge of cloud-pruned boxwood.
Above: Waves of low box (L) once defined the boundaries of Dirkje’s rose parterre. Transplanted and clipped, they reinforce the gentle swaying motion of the perennial grasses and coneflowers. The reflecting pool (R) has sloping banks.
Above: Tightly clipped beech stand sentinel. Van der Hilst removed discrete portions of the high hedges that enclosed the garden to open up views and create a relationship to the pastures of neighboring dairy farms.
Above: Dirkje’s son Menno became a garden designer after helping van der Hilst on the project.
Above: Pruned into the shape of two enormous cubes, beech trees provide vertical interest against a distant horizon.
Above: Willem Boer, who purchased 2.5 acres of land abutting his property in 2007 to effectively double the size of the garden, was soon after struck suddenly with a crippling disease.
Friends pitched in to help Dirkje and Willem’s son, Menno, care for the property. When Willem Boer died in 2013 at age 65, his neighbors were among the pallbearers.
Above: Sometimes when Menno Boer is working on the property, he notices bicyclists stopping alongside the road so they can peer through a hedge into the garden. “They always say how beautiful it is,” he told Architectural Digest. “Everyone is surprised to discover what’s hidden here.”
