Required Reading: Gardens Under Big Skies—Reimagining Outdoor Space, the Dutch Way via Gardenista [Shared]

Required Reading: Gardens Under Big Skies—Reimagining Outdoor Space, the Dutch Way – Gardenista

When we think of the Dutch landscape, water and flatness come to mind—a scene so “monotonous” that British writer Noel Kingsbury used to complain to Holland’s garden superstar Piet Oudolf that it was impossible not to get lost. “Learning to read the landscape takes time,” says Oudolf in the foreword to this erudite and fascinating new book, “and not all visitors are prepared to do that.”

Gardens Under Big Skies, published by Filbert Press, lavishly illustrates that the devil is in the detail: Dutch gardening is distinguished by “its clarity of form and its desire to embrace the contemporary,” in the words of co-author and photographer Maayke de Ridder. The low-lying landscape (about a third of which is below sea level) is key to the rigorously forward-thinking garden scene in the Netherlands.

Read Required Reading: Gardens Under Big Skies—Reimagining Outdoor Space, the Dutch Way – Gardenista