Jacques Wirtz

Gardener whose innovative designs grew ever more popular

Jacques Wirtz, an acclaimed Belgian landscape architect whose innovative gardens blended sculptural treatment of boxwood and yew hedges with a deep knowledge of plants and flowers, died on 21 July at his home in Schoten, Belgium. He was 93.

His son Peter said the cause was pneumonia.

Wirtz, whose career began when he opened a flower nursery in 1946, would decades later be compared to André Le Nôtre, the French landscape architect who designed the magnificent gardens of Versailles.

“He applied classical techniques of gardening in new and inventive ways, using rhythms, patterns and repetitions that were truly hypnotic,” Brad Mckee, editor of Landscape Architecture Magazine, said in a telephone interview.

“He broke out of the symmetries that you’d see in places like Versailles and violated them in quite memorable ways.”

Wirtz designed gardens for private residences, large estates, public parks, museums, college campuses and corporate headquarters.

In Paris, he redesigned the Carrousel Garden, which links the Louvre to the Tuileries, and also the gardens of Élysée Palace, the residence of French presidents.

In Osaka, Japan, Wirtz created the garden at the Belgian pavilion of Expo ’70, his breakthrough international project.

At the Crystalline private museum in Mol-rauw, Belgium, Wirtz transformed the lakeside grounds of an old estate with tall greybeige grasses that would wave in the wind in the sandy soil as they ascended to the main building.

And in northern England, he and his son Peter reimagined the gardens at the 11th-century Alnwick Castle for the 12th Duchess of Northumberland. It included a labyrinth with 500 bamboo plants, a rose garden with 3,000 roses in 180 varieties, a serpent garden with swirling yew hedges and eight steel water sculptures, a soaring water cascade and a $7 million treehouse built amid 17 lime trees.

The duchess wanted to hire the Wirtzes – Jacques and his sons Peter and Martin, who worked with him – as soon as she met them in 1990.

“I had to give them free rein,” she told the New York Times Magazine in 2004.

Wirtz, whose thinking was inspired by the music of Bach, Bruckner and Chopin, believed a garden had to have integrity in all seasons.

“A garden that is not beautiful in winter is not a beautiful garden,” he said.

To that end, Wirtz preferred tousetreeswithstrongbranch systems that retain their form without leaves, and plants such as beech hedges, whose leaves turn a coppery hue in winter.

Thomas Rainer, a landscape architect who teaches planting design at George Washington University, said in an interview that Wirtz’s art “didn’t emerge from any highminded concepts, but from decades of physically taming landscapes and hedges. He started as a gardener.”

Wirtz’s expansive private garden – on the grounds of an 18th-century estate where he lived – served as a laboratory for his horticultural designs.

“The plants, at first glance, appear to be pagan creatures immobilised under some sort of spell,” Véronique Vienne wrote in Metropolis magazine in 2010.

“In the foreground, the wavy rows of unevenly clipped boxwood, as intricate as cloud formations on Tibetan scrolls, cast strange scalloped shadows on the silky-smooth surface of the dry, sandy walkways.”

Wirtz was born in Antwerp on 31 December 1924, to Maurice and Maria (Van Nes) Wirtz. His father was a stockbroker and travel agent, and his mother was a housewife. As a youngster, Wirtz did poorly in school.

“He was ridiculed because of his fiery ginger hair and wasn’t taken seriously by his teachers,” Peter Wirtz said in a eulogy for his father.

But he found his calling at horticultural school in Vilvoorde, about 26 miles from Antwerp.

During te Second World War, Wirtz was forced by the occupying Germans to work in Germany – he found work in a nursery – and later served in the Belgian infantry.

Working from his own nursery after the war, he started knocking on doors in Schoten, looking to maintain and create gardens.

“My father knew hunger in the war,” Peter Wirtz said in 2004.

“I think that as a result of his experience he was driven to workveryhard;heneverwanted to be hungry again. When we were children, he worked from seven in the morning to seven in the evening. Every day.”

His garden for the Belgian pavilion at Expo ’70 brought him wide recognition, but his travels to Japan also provided him with an advanced horticultural education in Japanese gardens, which are known for their precision, and helped influence his gardening.

His reputation grew even more when he won a design contest for the Carrousel Garden, with its radiating yew hedges.

In addition to his son Peter, Wirtz’s survivors include his wife, Wilhelmina Thiers; sons Martin and Geert; a daughter, Anne Wirtz; seven grandchildren, and a sister, Mona Wirtz.

In the last few years, as Wirtz left more work to his sons, he spent time in his garden, sketching his plants. Describing the range of his father’s work, Peter Wirtz said in his eulogy that he “could intuitively and smoothly switch from modern asceticism to a wild cornucopia.”

“He applied classical techniques of gardening in new and inventive ways, using rhythms, patterns and repetitions that were truly hypnotic”