Jacques Wirtz
Garden designer famous for his billowing topiary who designed the new garden at Alnwick Castle
JACQUES WIRTZ, who has died aged 93, was Europe’s most widely respected landscape and garden designer, famous for his use of free-form topiary – playful organic mounds of “cloud-pruned” box, yew or hornbeam, to provide green structure all the year round and, where appropriate, backing for a restrained palette of perennials.
For many years the Belgian-born Wirtz, who later worked in collaboration with his sons, Peter and Martin, remained something of a secret among garden designers. Beginning in 1948, his early commissions were for small private gardens around Antwerp, his reputation spreading through discreet personal recommendations. It was only later that the clear contours and architectural, yet soft and billowing quality of his work began to win commissions for public parks and other large spaces in the city.
A breakthrough came in 1970 when Wirtz was asked to design the garden of the Belgian pavilion at the Osaka World Exposition and a new campus for the University of Antwerp. Later, the Wirtzes’ renovation of the gardens of the Élysée Palace in Paris and the Jardin du Carrousel, linking the Louvre to the Tuileries and featuring a sunburst pattern of radiating yew hedges, brought international acclaim and won Jacques Wirtz comparisons with André Le Nôtre, the designer of the gardens at Versailles.
A writer in the Architectural Digest has compared the disquieting beauty of Wirtz’s designs to the hotel gardens in Alain Renais’s surrealist masterpiece Last Year at Marienbad (1961), in which the cast wander slowly through sculptured geometric trees and hedges, mysteriously casting shadows while the trees do not.
Despite his formidable reputation on the Continent, Wirtz only came to public attention in Britain in 1996 when he and his sons were chosen, amid much controversy, to design a garden on a 12-acre walled site at Alnwick Castle by Jane, the current Duchess of Northumberland. His appointment to lay out one of the country’s largest (and most expensive) new gardens for a century provoked a backlash among some British competitors, one commentator observing that “the old guard took it as a slap in the face, as if the duchess had said no one here was up to the job”, though he conceded that younger British designers were mostly “prowirtz”.
Wirtz delivered a formal plan for the garden in 1997, including a “poison” garden full of toxic plants, a “Grand Cascade” of 21 separate waterfalls, a labyrinth with 500 bamboo plants, a “Serpent Garden” consisting of eight water sculptures nestling in the coils of a giant topiary snake, and one of the largest tree houses in the world – all united by a backbone of miles of beech hedges, clipped hornbeams and yew.
There was an immediate backlash from conservationists. Planning permission for the project was bitterly opposed by English Heritage and other bodies on the grounds that the site contained works of national importance, including the “productive gardens” of “Algernon the Magnificent”, one of the duke’s ancestors, which were reputedly designed by William Nesfield, who also laid out the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew.
A withering critique of the plans was also circulated by the Garden History Society. The plans were eventually approved after much expense, but in an interview with the Times, the duchess confessed that at one point she had considered selling the plans to America to be built on a greenfield site. Yet before his death, her brother in law, the 11th duke, had been granted planning permission to turn much of the site into a car park.
When the garden was formally opened by the Prince of Wales in 2002, critics remained divided, with some hailing it as a marvel of theatricality and ambition and others dismissing it as a hugely expensive folly (by the time it opened, it was estimated to have cost some £43million, derived from a mixture of public financing and private donations).
The Daily Telegraph’s gardening correspondent, Mary Keen, herself an internationally renowned garden designer, acknowledged the garden as an “extraordinary achievement”, but found it a place where “nature has been banished”, noting that while many modern European designers might have chosen to link the garden with the beautiful surrounding landscape of Northumberland, “the Wirtzes seem to like to remain in control”.
Yet there is no doubt that the garden has proved a popular tourist attraction, with nearly 350,000 paying visitors last year, having contributed, by one estimate, £236.8m to the local economy since it first opened. In 2005 it won the award for outstanding contribution to tourism at the Enjoy England Excellence Awards.
Jacques Wirtz was born on New Year’s Eve 1924 in Schoten, a suburb of Antwerp. His father was a stockbroker. Young Jacques did not do well at school, where he was bullied for his red hair, but found his niche when he went to study horticulture and landscape architecture at a horticultural school in Vilvoorde. During the Second World War he was sent as a forced labourer to Germany, where he found work in a nursery.
Returning to Belgium after the war ended, he opened a flower nursery in 1946 and began doing garden design and maintenance work in and around Schoten, eventually founding his own garden design business in 1950.
After his work on the Belgian pavilion in Osaka, his approach to garden and landscape design would be much influenced by the sculptural traditions of Japanese garden design.
Notable other commissions included Jubilee Park, a landscaped space on top of the Jubilee Line tube station at Canary Wharf in London’s Docklands, and the gardens at the Chateau de Primard, west of Paris, formerly the home of the actress Catherine Deneuve.
But perhaps the best example of his style was the garden he created in the grounds of a four-acre walled garden north-east of Antwerp, which had once formed part of a great 18th century estate, and which he bought, with a gardener’s cottage, in the 1970s. More or less derelict when he moved in, it became a laboratory for his designs and it was here that he honed his skills with the hedge trimmer.
When Wirtz took over the garden, the box hedges were severely neglected, many full of holes and others badly overgrown. Instead of ripping them out, he started clipping them hard back to healthy wood where possible, following their natural contours and in the process creating a vast, tumbling mass of billowing mounds running the whole length of the garden.
The stunning overall effect had garden writers reaching for the purple ink, one enthusing over “hedges running away into the distance like a bank of thunder clouds” and noting how “their billowing contours harness the light and call for little else around them as distraction”.
Sarah Raven, writing in the Independent on Sunday, was moved to call for a “box revolution”, observing that nothing grows better “in the dark, dank and visually sterile spaces which pass for so many peoples’ back gardens. Cram them with box and the Wirtz example shows that it does not have to be the garden equivalent of twinset and pearls.”
Jacques Wirtz is survived by his wife, Wilhelmina, and by three sons and a daughter.
Jacques Wirtz, born December 31 1924, died July 21 2018