Gardening
GOING DUTCH
Mid-september, Dordrecht: I'm standing alongside a row of dusky, orange Tithonia rotundifolia – Mexican sunflowers – towering above my head, and I'm 6ft tall. They're perennial on their native southern US grasslands but grown as an annual in northern European gardens.
My visit to South Holland (one of 12 provinces that comprise the Netherlands) marks a fond farewell to this year's summer, an anguished season for many gardeners as we struggled to nurture our darling plants in temperatures more likely experienced in the Nile delta.
Skeins of early-morning dewy cobwebs curtain the vegetation, swallows are gathering on overhead wires, and flamboyant flowers shed petals to reveal a miscellany of tawny seedheads – a survival grain store for non-migratory birds during the coming shorter days.
This is the garden of Villa Augustus, a hotel imaginatively converted from Dordrecht's 19th-century water tower, where residual, interior industrial bones – girders, rafters and panelling – have been cleaned and amusingly dressed in an eclectic array of unlikely ‘shabby chic' furniture and exciting fabrics. Its floriferous and utilitarian gardens give me as much pleasure now as they did on an earlier midsummer visit.
A trio of inspired Dutch designers and architects – Hans Loos, Dorine de Vos and Daan van der Have – grappled with this redundant building and improbable watery site in 2006, excavating the immediate four-acre surroundings to a depth of several feet and importing some 11,000 cubic yards of new soil.
Apart from its formal layout, there's a bosky ‘English garden' threaded with sinuous paths, a limonaia for the overwintering of pot-grown citrus, box and hornbeam hedges cut with niches for some spirited ‘classical' statuary, a pair of glasshouses wherein ripen dessert grapes, tomatoes and peppers, and a few shade-giving mulberry and cherry trees.
But the formal layout is the beating heart of this exuberant garden, looked after by a team of dedicated grafters under the direction of English head gardener Kate Shepherd, who made the Netherlands her home some 40 years ago.
What excites me most about these gardens are the Mondrian-like blocks of colour interspersed with roses on knee-high hoops and orchard fruits on criss-cross cordons. Annual and perennial plants flourish in small, square, rectangular and triangular beds in a design almost entirely bereft of curves and circles.
At the year's end, it remains bountiful, illuminated by geometric swathes of salvias and antirrhinums, shoulder-high feathery cosmos, smokey-blue asters, heleniums, lime-green nicotiana, bright orange calendulas, persicarias and chalky-white Japanese anemones.
Among them, destined for the hotel's restaurant and market café, is a cornucopia of brassicas, salad greens, herbs, an arsenal of heavy pumpkins and squashes and, a trick I've not seen before, courgettes trained up sticks to protect them from the ill effects of a damp bed, to save space and for ease of picking.
Why, though, a utilitarian urban Victorian building renamed Villa Augustus? My companion, Dutch-born garden historian Sophie Piebenga, gives two possible reasons: to commemorate Emperor Augustus, who restored order and calm to the Roman state, allowing for the development of the villa rurale to which well-to-do Roman city dwellers could retire for relaxation; and the month of August is possibly the richest month for garden harvests.
Whatever the reason, strive to weave this remarkable establishment into your 2019 travel plans.