Garden for @koehorstintveld, taking a practical approach; thinking how to reuse materials already present on site and incorporate elements from their wonderful design practice. Great execution and collaboration with @jobtuinvormgeving

A few years ago we obtained an allotment garden at an island in the river Maas; 240 m2 of land with a little house on it. Over the years, the garden has become a place to learn about plants, to read, to write, to be with family and friends, to store my growing ceramic collection, to worry about, to let the dogs run wild, to escape the city, to care for, to neglect, to work in, to be useless in, to make a mess, to try, to fail, to aim and to let go. This garden offers me experiences and thoughts different than the other spaces I move between; never finished, forever changing, forcing me to adapt and move along.

A former industrial harbour area in the north of Amsterdam is being transformed into a housing area. Warehouses, cranes and large infrastructural spaces are being replaced with orderly architecture and polished public space. Garden with a memory incorporates spolia from the site’s industrial past. Not removing all that has been, but instead growing from it. When all the industry has been replaced, this garden serves as a living and growing memory of what once was. Thanks for the opportunity to create this @mousewatcher Construction by the always fantastic Paul Casteleijn In collaboration with Roberta di Cosmo / @robertadicosmo and Studio Audal / @studio.audal

Some recent pics @marijn_huigen sent over. Planting seems to be developing nicely, lots of foliage! Thanks Marijn, for the pics and for taking such great care of the garden 😘

In case you’re not following @duncan.gibbs, you should. Fantastic posts, showing timeless, inspiring projects. Recently he posted the Geometriske Haver by Sørensen, a project that changed a lot for me and made me feel more at place in landscape architecture. (pssst, @duncan.gibbs, I tried to send you these via mail, but didn’t work, so I thought I’d post them over here 💁🏼‍♂️) (pssst @kjeldslothaveroglandskaber I know you have tons of photos of this project, can you share?)

Wild Cube by Lois Weinberger, a fenced off gap in the pavement, where time and space is provided for natural processes to manifest itself. I love this point where it's not sure if the cage is there to protect the plants from the people or the other way round. ⁠⁠ ⁠⁠ "The visible - the grating - is intended as an enclosure / for a room / emerged from a precise carelessness towards what is generally referred to as nature. Furthermore, a work on becoming and passing away - towards our invisible nature / the nature of the spirit. An enclosure as a framework act / at the same time containment and exclusion / a gap in urban space. The plant society - whatever grows - is the actual sculpture. BEING SO HAS MOVED INTO THE FIELD OF VIEW - EVERYDAY TRANSPORT - SOMETHING TO BECOME. And yet a second hand nature. There is an outside and an inside / whose interface is permeable due to the choice of bars - a limitless house for living beings - so the reforestation will be left to the wind / the birds / the seeds that are already in the earth. The concept envisages installing this RUDERAL CAGE in different places - in cities as well as in the countryside."⁠⁠ ⁠⁠ ⁠⁠ 📝📸 loisweinberger.net

Two years back we visited Älmhult, Sweden. While my husband checked out the IKEA museum, I stumbled upon this cemetery just across the street. Hedges in clear lines divide the space and create privacy for visiting relatives. A series of green rooms, made from grass, hedges and the clouds. Every other day the caretaker rakes the gravel pathways, creating a pattern. This element of care is such an important element of the design, seeing the space is cared for, respected, loved even. Across the site you find tool stations, also carefully designed and maintained. I hope one day I get to work on a cemetery, and create such a respectful place for deceased and relatives.

‘Impacted by the brutality of the 20’s century wars, the region Hauts de France chose to celebrate tomorrow’s heritage and affirm its resilience in landscape art by creating an itinerary on the sites of a memory of the Great War: the gardens of peace in les Hauts-de-France. The Armistice glade, in the Forest of Compiègne, is one of the most significant sites of World War One. The Armistice was signed there, on the 11th of November 1918, in a rail coach, today worldwide known. The garden of the third train, designed by the landscaper Marc Blume, the artist Gilles Brusset and the architect Francesca Liggieri is a Franco-German project taking place around the allee, joining the parking to the glade, making it a memorable walk before discovering the location of the Armistice. Inside the undergrowth, the three designers thought about a symbolic and plastic parallel between the trails of the trenches of the Great War and the shapes drawn by the filaments of the mycelium network. Following this pattern, the paths of the garden make their way windingly through the foliage, creating rounded and planted areas where different essences of the forest can be seen. Adding itself to this maze leading to the discovery of the undergrowth, an elongated bench crosses the garden and invites contemplation. A multitude of mirrors is inserted in this wooden bench reflecting the sky and the leaves like a third train reflecting peace. The garden of the third train is an undergrowth garden which embraces the vastness of humus. It takes on the perception of the visitors through their movement in space and  encourage the discovery of a peacefull place by offering new, wringely and random paths. He takes place like a third component between the trees and the people: a link that associates contemplation, meditation and celebration of life.’

How to welcome the sea into a garden? A few years back architectural historian and I researched different ways of representing a larger landscape within the confined space of the garden. One of the casestudies was the Dutch pavilion at the 1958 worldexpo in Brussels. This pavilion was not a replication of the Dutch landscape, but a patchwork of landscape fragments and iconic images. The basin with which the breaking waves were simulated was impressive, illustrative of the design attitude of the architects. Visually, there was nothing natural about the bowl of water, but when visitors closed their eyes, they felt the water on their skin, the wind through their hair, and smelled the salty sea air. Hostess Beatrijs van Liebergen mentioned: “People mainly wanted to see the artificial sea. Because that was very impressive, you would swear that you were at the sea“.  Also elsewhere, “citations” from the polder landscape were sufficient: a row of poplars, pollard willows, a grass dike, basalt boulders, a dolphin, a lighthouse, a meadow and a consort. It was about smell and feeling. In the "polder" stood a cow that was milked by the farmer. A suckling pig and goat Betsy completed the whole. It worked. The pavilion was chosen as one of the best pavilions at the expo. "I am full of admiration for the waves generated by technical means that crash into the banks," said a boy on a school trip. Architect J.J.P. Oud called the pavilion "a symbol that does not speculate on the cheap show element of clogs and mills, but that for the Dutchman who goes to the exhibition is somewhat the Netherlands itself and for a stranger the atmosphere makes our country tangible."

I’ve been fanboying @terremoto_landscape before and I will probably do it again. In my opininon they represent a new school of landscapers who take into account the whole ecosystem of a project and try to do all parties involved justice. They shape new relations between humans and other-than-humans and create an archetypal aesthetic along the way. And did I mention David Godshall is a really great guy? Project shown here is Varda Landing. All pics by @terremoto_landscape

Marnas! The private garden of Sven-Ingvar Andersson. We visited about a year and a half ago, thanks to @malinhirdman. We were welcomed by his daughter and her partner, while their grandkids played in the garden. Wonderful to see how time changed the garden I knew only from images. It was much wilder, less controlled than I expected it to be. Wonderful to see the peculair topiary shapes, structuring the garden. There’s a great site about the garden by Anne Whiston Spirn: marnasgarden.com

Got to see this gem by @coyotewillow @danpearsonstudio last summer. ‘In the rugged borderland between England and Scotland, there is a renaissance happening. Outside the market town of Penrith, a wild, imaginative garden is rising up, set against the austere ruins of Lowther Castle. Cumbria, with its poetic links to the birthplace of the eighteenth-century Romantic era, could not be a more fitting place for this garden… The garden is far from finished – the best gardens never are – and there are plans to extend the planting further into the ruin and also to create a rose garden where military tanks once churned grass into mud. There is a constant struggle for money and visitor numbers and the harsh weather does not help, but as plants colonise the stone mullions and soaring towers of the crumbling building, Lowther is well on its way to become one of the most atmospheric and exciting gardens in the country.’ 📝 Clare Foster @clarefostergardens for @houseandgardenuk @lowther_castle