Gardens Under Big Skies

Name: Gardens Under Big Skies
ISBN: 9781999734596

Reimagining Outdoor Space, the Dutch Way

By Noel Kingsbury · Photographs by Maayke de Ridder

The Netherlands is steeped in horticultural history and its gardens have long been a place for innovation and progressive thinking, exemplified by iconic figures such as the landscape architect Mien Ruys and naturalistic plant pioneers Piet Oudolf and Henk Gerritsen. In this book, Noel Kingsbury and Maayke de Ridder explore how the particularities of landscape, history and culture in the Netherlands have given rise to distinctive gardens and demonstrate how a new generation of Dutch designers including Jacqueline van der Kloet, Frank van der Lieden and Arjan Boekel, are reimagining outdoor space in such a revolutionary way.

Dr Noel Kingsbury is an acclaimed garden designer, writer and long-time collaborator of the renowned designer Piet Oudolf. With Annie Guilfoyle he runs the highly successful Garden Masterclass. Noel is a leading figure in naturalistic planting design and writes widely on this and related topics.

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Inside the book

Sample pages.

Press

What reviewers said.

...A fascinating and insightful assessment of today’s Dutch gardens, looking into the influences of history, tradition and environment along with the personal journeys of today’s cohort of designers and the gardens they have created. I have found it a fabulous read, informative, insightful and so perfectly enjoyable. Yes, I loved it!

— Paddy Tobin, An Irish Gardener
For any gardener who sees Dutch gardening as synonymous with Oudolf’s communities of grasses and perennials, and perhaps hankers for something more structured (or even super-structured, like Holland’s baroque gardens), this book fills in the blanks and so much more.

— Kendra Wilson, Required Reading in Gardenista
This is an important and well-produced book that achieves that rare combination of high-quality photographs and plans with serious, analytical writing. It’s an artful ecology philosophy that presents a compelling vision for gardens of the future.

— Nigel Dunnett, RHS The Garden
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.

— Lee Buttala, Berkshire Edge
Gosh, what a book! This has to be on the 'you need this book' list.

— Blackberry Garden blog
An essential read for modern gardeners

— Tim Richardson, The Telegraph

About the author

Noel Kingsbury

Noel Kingsbury has spent three decades arguing — in books, lectures and design work — for an ecological approach to planting design. He has written some twenty-five books on plants, gardens and landscape, four of them with the Dutch designer Piet Oudolf, whom he first met in Holland in 1994, and has done as much as anyone in English to give the new perennial movement a working vocabulary.

About the photographer

Maayke de Ridder

Maayke de Ridder studied fashion design at the Arnhem Academy of Art and at Minerva Academy in Groningen, then graphic design at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. She worked as a fashion and interiors stylist and as a picture editor for a number of Dutch magazines before moving behind the camera — and that earlier life is legible in the way she frames a garden: composed, edited, alert to colour and light as much as to plants.

Gardens Under Big Skies

About the author

About the photographer

A letter from the editors.