Henk Gerritsen

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Henk Gerritsen (born December 10, 1948 in Utrecht ; † November 6, 2008 ) was a Dutch landscape gardener .

Life

Henk Gerritsen was born in Utrecht in 1948. Up to the age of almost 30, his botanical interest focused exclusively on wild plants and plant communities in their natural habitats . He was particularly impressed by the research project Plantengemeenschappen in Nederland by the Dutch botanist, poet and conservationist Victor Westhoff in 1969 . Reading them he remembered Dutch landscapes and vividly imagined their plant communities. From 1967 he traveled many times through Europe, including to the Alps , Ireland , Greece , Andalusia and Slovenia , and in 1970 also to Afghanistan , to study natural plant communities as an autodidact . At that time, however, he did not yet consider turning this passion into a profession. From 1968 he studied political science and history in Amsterdam , from 1976 to 1985 he worked as a visual artist .

In 1977 he met the landscape gardener Mien Ruys and was deeply impressed by her garden. In 1978 he and his partner Anton Schlepers began to lay out the Priona Gardens in the village of Schuinesloot in the Dutch province of Overijssel . He worked as an illustrator on a series of gardening books by Arend Jan van der Horst and designed natural gardens for the garden architecture office Mien Ruys. He was looking for plants with a natural appearance and reliable robustness. He found such plants in the nursery of Piet Oudolf , whom he met in 1983 and with whom he was on friendly terms throughout his life. In 1986 he moved permanently to Schuinesloot and worked mainly for the Priona Gardens, which he opened to the public. After Anton Scheper's death in 1993, he tended the gardens on his own with the help of volunteers and interns. 1999 visited Strilli Oppenheimer, wife of South African entrepreneur Nicky Oppenheimer , the Priona Gardens and found in Gerritsen a soulmate friend and garden designer with the same respect for nature. In the following years Gerritsen designed some gardens for the Oppenheimer family, especially on the Waltham Place estate in the English county of Berkshire . He used a naturalistic style which also included formal elements such as neatly cut box hedges and sharply delimited lawns .

In several books together, Henk Gerritsen and Piet Oudolf described their experiences with wild and cultivated plants that can assert themselves in a natural garden without much effort. Gerritsen died after a serious illness in November 2008 at the age of 59, a few months after the publication of his famous book Buiten is het Groen (literally translated: It's green outside , German title: Garden Manifesto ). The Priona Gardens he designed are considered a successful balancing act between wilderness and natural garden design. A foundation takes care of their continued existence. Together with Piet Oudolf and a few other gardeners, Henk Gerritsen is one of the pioneers of the New Dutch Wave , a garden design that takes account of natural areas of life and ecological principles .

style

Like Piet Oudolf, Henk Gerritsen was initially strongly influenced by Mien Ruys . Mien Ruys described her garden design as “a wild plantation with a strict design.” When Gerritsen laid out the Priona Gardens in 1978, he had the flower meadows of Central and Southern Europe in mind and wanted to create this image in his garden. He tried to refute Mien Ruys' statement, "You cannot imitate nature in the garden", but admitted over the years that Mien Ruys was right: a different plant community would naturally grow at the location of every garden that was created . Gerritsen then wanted to create gardens that at least resembled nature reserves in terms of their plant diversity and harmony , without the use of artificial fertilizers or pesticides and without the fight against " weeds " and " vermin ". In his opinion, the maintenance of a garden should never degenerate into a fight against nature. Once the beauty of natural processes such as falling, wilting and dying of plants has been recognized, gardening can be limited to a few interventions according to the following principles:

  • Maintaining architectural elements : regularly cut hedges, mowed grass paths and lawns give the observer the illusion that the other garden areas are also “tidy”.
  • Gardening like a cow : The weekly "grazing" of disturbing wild herbs with your hands (without removing the roots) is quick, reduces their growth performance and, above all, does not disturb the soil.
  • Gardening like an elephant : The annual rough pruning or digging up plants that are too large lets more light through and prevents the monotony of less dominant species.
  • Saving water : The acceptance of dry periods creates seasonal natural garden images and promotes stress-tolerant, site-appropriate plants.
  • Clever combination : Strong perennials in the fertile garden areas, where stubborn wild herbs such as groundweed feel comfortable, make them look like mere ground cover. Many smaller and demanding perennials do well in areas with dry, poor soil, saving work and hassle.

Over the years, Gerritsen introduced strict design elements to replace the missing landscape in cramped gardens with no attractive views . He played with opposing shapes by adding curved paths, undulating hedges and shapeless borders in gardens with existing straight elements (such as straight walls, symmetrical hedges or right-angled paths). Conversely, in overly shapeless garden areas, he added straight and strict elements. Because he struggled with the traditional forms of the hedge, he created asymmetrical, bizarre topiary from yew and boxwood , which he surrounded with tall but transparent plants. He considered symmetrically laid out gardens to be fundamentally out of date, since today there is practically no chaotic, frightening nature that should be excluded in the garden. In his gardens he wanted to recreate today's idealized impressions, for example that of a blooming forest edge .

plants

Henk Gerritsen was primarily interested in "unusually common" plant species, and less so in varieties and breeds . Hundreds of species grow in the Priona Gardens, of which Gerritsen counted 78 species on the Dutch Red List . He valued stock-forming species such as chickweed , common catchwort , meadow scum herb , spotted dead nettle , real betonia and red carnation , especially those with good long-distance effects on extensive meadows . He also liked plants that only reveal the touch of the unusual at second glance: rarer buttercups such as the monkshood buttercup and the woolly buttercup , thistles with special leaf and flower shapes such as the nodding thistle , the biennial donkey thistle and the perennial brook thistle . Gerritsen was fascinated by European orchid species because of their “fragile and self-confident charisma”, especially Ragwurzen with their optical and pheromonic imitation of female insects . Since the cultivation of wild orchids in gardens is difficult, he liked to use betonias as "orchid substitutes ".

In addition to the ornamental grasses introduced into garden design by Karl Foerster and Ernst Pagels , he discovered some hitherto little noticed grasses for the garden, for example forest dwarfs , quaking grass and various types of sedges . Gerritsen also appreciated the different leaf and growth forms of the umbelliferae , of which, however, many species in his gardens turned out to be unreliable. He considered the rose-blooming varieties of the Great Bibernelle and the Rough-haired Calf's Goiter to be reliable . B. Vegetable parsnip , medicinal herb and Peloponnesian umbel . Among the composites , he particularly appreciated the combination of coarse, dark foliage with fine yellow flowers in the cup plant , telekie and elephant .

Gerritsen only developed an interest in trees and shrubs with the years of gardening practice, even though the ancient oaks on the Priona property had inspired him to design the garden. Otherwise he planned with small trees and shrubs. Apart from random and welcomed shrubs ( hawthorn , mountain ash , elderberry , hazelnut , cornel cherry ), ecological considerations played a subordinate role in the selection. So he planted chestnuts , laurel roses , tree aralia , bubble ash , the Persian ironwood tree and other witch hazel plants, regardless of their non-European origin, purely for aesthetic reasons and also accepted more care. Since the last ice age there has been a shortage of indigenous shrubs and trees in Europe anyway , so that East Asian and North American species quickly became a choice. Basically, he found gardens with exclusively native plants rather boring and questioned definitions of native plants . Strictly speaking, only plants from the surrounding area should then be included in the garden. In the meantime, however, almost all plant communities are influenced by humans, even the ground elder first came to Central Europe with the Romans . More important than a strict view of the origin are the support of diversity and a location-appropriate attitude of the plants.

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Works

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Life data on online-familieberichten.nl, accessed on May 2, 2020
  2. ↑ a b c d e Henk Gerritsen: Garden Manifesto. Eugen Ulmer publishing house, Stuttgart (Hohenheim) 2014, ISBN 978-3-8001-8387-6 .
  3. ^ CV of Henk Gerritsen on the website of the Priona Tuinen Foundation (English): [1]
  4. ↑ Plants and us blog about Waltham Place (English): [2]
  5. ↑ Ornamental Gardens on the website of the estate Waltham Place (English): [3]
  6. ↑ Website of the Foundation Priona Tuinen (Dutch, English): [4]
  7. ^ Excursion report Netherlands. The Dutch Wave of the Osnabrück University of Applied Sciences / Faculty of Agricultural Sciences and Landscape Architecture: [5] , pp. 5–9.
  8. ↑ Wild Gardening blog about the gardens of Mien Ruys, Henk Gerritsen and Piet Oudolf: [6]
  9. ↑ Henk Gerritsen's garden philosophy on the website of the Priona Tuinen Foundation (English): [7]

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Gerritsen, Henk
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Dutch landscape gardener
DATE OF BIRTH December 10, 1948
PLACE OF BIRTH Utrecht
DATE OF DEATH November 6, 2008