ENCLOSURE ACT
A small walled garden in the Dutch city of Zaltbommel is the stage for a mini-meadow of naturalised spring bulbs
Clockwise from top left Carien’s 19th-century house with the church of Sint Maarten behind.
‘Album’. The small orchard surrounded by clipped .
‘Actaea’. Muscari botryoides Fagus sylvatica Narcissus poeticus
My husband wanted a lawn,” says garden designer Carien van Boxtel. Admittedly, he did not mean a manicured, sit-on-mower kind of lawn, rather the ‘ let’s kick a ball about’ variety. But as I step into Carien’s garden, I am pretty sure he got more than he expected. It is a hortus conclusus, behind a 19th-century vicarage-turned-schoolmaster’s house and now family home, at the foot of the 15th-century church of Sint Maarten in Zaltbommel. The garden’s rear wall dates back to the 12th century and at one time formed part of the city’s ramparts. Barrister-turned-garden designer Carien and her family moved here 13 years ago. “Gardening is part of my genetic make-up,” she says. “My father and grandfather were avid fans of the garden designer Mien Ruys, and when I was a law student in Amsterdam, my digs were next door to her office.” It must have been fate. Despite running a successful law practice, Carien changed career and enrolled in a four-year garden design course at Larenstein University.
Carien hired Arend Jan van der Horst to lay out a design for her garden, but was determined to choose the planting herself. “There is more to designing a garden than putting in plants: the effect of light and shade, the spatial play with perspective and levels, a sense of cohesive composition,” she says. The original garden was traditional. Following Arend Jan’s advice, Carien took down some trees and started filling borders with plants from her former home. Everything, including an archway found in a local orchard, was brought in via a small door from a neighbour’s garden. To the left and right of the archway are modest vegetable plots, and behind it a mini-orchard hedged with Fagus sylvatica, where Pyrus communiss ‘Doyenne du Comice’ and Prunus domestica