In 2016 I designed and realized a garden for the Garden festival Appeltern. The theme of the festival was “garden of desires”. The festival choose this theme as it coincided with the year of Jheronimus Bosch [https://www.bezoekdenbosch.nl/nl/wat-te-doen/jheronimusbosch]. Just like Bosch’s triptych “Garden of desires”, I associated a garden of desire not only with gentle and divine. The elements of decay and the dark side of life are prominent on the paintings and my garden design as well.
A garden of desires implies a garden of abundance, where trees grow unlimitedly in the sky and food is up for grabs. However, Desire can also turn into a situation where men is continuously and obsessively trying to satisfy its desires. This will in turn lead to greed and excess. The result is a pile of waste and an impingement on nature. In the garden this is symbolized by the mountain of garbage bags, further emphasized with dark leaved plants. The effects on nature are clearly visible in the middle of the garden: a barren landscape with a scattered garbage bag, dead tree branches, dark rocks and dark or red leaved plants and grasses. But there is always hope! In between the rocks new live is emerging from the heaps of rubble. Eventually nature will survive and the result is a true garden of desires. A garden with lots of colourful flowers and where you can sit underneath a tree to take the time to reflect on life.
The dark side of the garden is symbolized through the dark leaved plants and scruffy grasses like elder (Sambucus nigra ‘Black Lace’), sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas ‘Blackie’) and red sedge (Carex buchananii). Occasionally a little vegetation is growing in between the garbage: a real primal plant like the oak fern (Polypodium vulgare).
The transition from the dark side to the divine is realized through the use of brave pioneer plants like the big teasel (Dipsacus fullonum), spotted loosestrife (Lysimachia punctata), mullein (Verbascum nigrum) and parsnip (Pastinaca sativa).
In the divine part of the garden there is an explosion of colour through the use of different achillea (yellow and orange) combined with the pink spikes of the amaranth (Lythrum salicaria ‘Morden Pink’) and the red touches of the bergamotplant (Monarda ‘Squaw’).
Client: The gardens of Appeltern
Project type: Design Festival Garden
