Harry Pierik's Garden

Harry Pierik's house in Zolle

Harry Pierik is a successful Dutch landscape designer based in Zolle, northeast of Amsterdam. He implements up to 70 projects a year. Among them - landscaping of temples, city objects, parks and private gardens. One of his works can be seen on the same street as the designer's garden.

The owner of this house was lucky - rarely in a Dutch city gets such a significant piece of land in front of the entrance. Harry Pierik designed the path to the house with dense mixborders, combining small shrubs (Fortune's euonymus, dwarf barberries, roses and hydrangeas) with perennials (brunners, carnations, cuffs, geraniums, Labrador violets, onions). The dark brick pathway matches the color perfectly with the large plantain Atropurpurea. Like sunbeams, spots of purple, yellow, silvery plants break through the mixbroder canvas. To the right, from the space between the two houses, a cascade of purple scumpia and purple clematis “falls out”.

Harry Pierik project

Harry Pierik designed his own garden in a completely different way. He calls it a secret, since the garden is completely hidden behind the house among the urban development. The plot he got was not very successful, very elongated in length. However, it does not look squeezed by its neighbors thanks to its division into separate green rooms. The designer in his garden focused on vines and clipped forms, which, surrounding the central lawn, give the garden a three-dimensionality. Large amounts of green space have created a veritable jungle in this small garden. The impression is enhanced by tree ferns, fan palms and exotic birds, which, of course, had to be placed in a narrow aviary along the border of the garden.

Plumage of birds is perhaps the most striking color accent in the garden, otherwise the designer has very delicately treated the color. Green predominates everywhere, although upon closer inspection, sometimes the yellowish variegation of perennial balsam (Impatiens omeana), the modest color of hydrangea inflorescences, the blue hosta dusting or the caramel pastel of Heucher appears in places.

Harry Pierik applied a kind of know-how to create the cropped forms. Each of them does not consist of one plant, but of a combination of 25-30 species that grow into each other. In combination with geoplastics - in places the relief is raised or lowered - the illusion is created that low slopes are rising on the sides. Rare representatives of flora and the most banal weeds coexist in them quietly. They are also an integral part of closed plant volumes that form a shady introverted space.