ERIK DHONT'S HAUTE COUTURE GARDENS

Garden designers from the Low Countries are hitting the heights, none more deservedly than Erik Dhont. Andrew Mikolajski profiles a quiet achiever ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE Magazine, Spring 2009

International landscape architecture is a profession that requires the technical skills of a draughtsman, the horticultural knowledge of a gardener and the creativity of an artist. In the front rank of this multi-talented elite is a quietly spoken, 46-year-old Belgian many people have never heard of: Erik Dhont.

Dhont’s standing is such that his work is archived at Dumbarton Oaks, the historical garden library in Washington, while in March he gave a keynote speech at the Society of Garden Designers’ conference in London. He is much-liked as well as admired by those who come into contact with him—but is nonetheless self-deprecating. When I arrived late once at a lunch celebrating some of his new projects, he happily took me aside and gave me a thorough run-down of the presentation I’d just missed—from, it seemed, a genuine desire to make a connection. Even now he protests—while on the phone from Malibu, where he’s completing a six-acre private garden overlooking the ocean—“I’m not a star. It’s the clients who are the heroes.”

During the past decade, the Low Countries have provided us with any number of landscaping big-hitters who’d be more than happy to be described as stars. Jacques Wirtz and his son Peter are well established as cutting-edge designers on a grand scale (although the much-photographed garden they made for the Duchess of Northumberland at Alnwick Castle is in fact laid out on surprisingly traditional lines). The Dutch landscaper Piet Oudolf has been influential to the point of repetitiveness: his drifting mixed plantings of grasses and perennials are star attractions at both the Royal Horticultural Society gardens at Wisley, Surrey, and Pensthorpe conservation centre in Norfolk. And Jean-François van den Abeele’s “conservationist” gardens are well-known for creating environments sympathetic to man and nature.

Dhont is harder to categorise. His practice in the middle of Brussels—“neutral territory”, as he puts it—has a portfolio that includes everything from huge commercial projects, often involving urban regeneration, to work for private clients on large country estates with big budgets that can ultimately roll into millions, to much smaller (though still costly) city gardens. And, unusually for a landscape designer, his background is artistic—he studied graphics at the Sint-Lucasinstituut in Brussels and drawing continues to be at the core of his work: articles in European journals have compared his drawings to Matisse and Jean Dubuffet.

What is a marker is his finely tuned aesthetic sense, which typically embraces both the environment and the cultural heritage of a site. In a private garden in Dworp, a village in the countryside south of Brussels, he planted zigzagging hedges that echo shadows created by ancient earthworks in the fields beyond. At a garden in the grounds of a medieval bailiff’s house in Gaasbeek, he was inspired by a painting showing a Renaissance parterre on the site. He didn’t slavishly reconstruct this, but instead reinterpreted it as a modern labyrinth, laying out low, curving box hedges that both guide and frustrate. In one way, he is an acolyte of Alexander Pope’s concept of the genius loci—“the spirit of the place”. But look at his work and you know you could never call Dhont a classicist.

Instead, like modernist sculptors and artists such as Henry Moore or Ben Nicholson, he finds the management (or, more crudely, manipulation) of space is paramount. “I am always looking to balance spaces,” he tells me, “paring things down to the core, as if eliminating pieces on a chessboard. Designing a garden is like placing spaces in tension with each other, as in a painting. We alter the proportions of a space. We will give large areas more intimacy and make small areas appear larger.” He often talks about “volumes” and their reverse, “voids”, that create “guidelines” (his word). Hedges—he favours traditional box, yew and hornbeam—can be clipped in fantastic fashion, sometimes in billowing clouds or in geometric shapes, seldom exactly square. The spaces between the shapes matter as much as the shapes themselves. Heady stuff—but does that make the man actually a gardener? “Not really—I don’t see myself digging or pruning,” he says. Indeed, his elegant apartment in central Brussels has no garden. His landscapes are almost closer to sculpture than gardens.

Still, they have an emotional effect when you walk into them, with a clearly detectable rhythm and tension—both important concepts in his work, that perhaps provide the key to understanding it. The rhythm of his gardens is easy to experience: they invite exploration, with paths, planting and different levels dictating changes of pace—walk slow, stop, climb, walk faster—as you move through the space. Along the way there are sudden syncopations—a sightline shifting towards a landmark beyond the garden, a formal structure in an unexpected corner.

Such structures work as sculpture, too. In a recent project in Ohain, near Brussels, the garden draws you to a large, bespoke wood-and-steel palisade, punctuated by hollow cylinders that draw the eye upwards. This supports a planting of pleached Ginkgo biloba trees, their fluttery-leaved stems trained horizontally along the frame and plaited together in a traditional technique here given a new spin. The placing of the palisade, within a copse of cherry trees and evergreen shrubs, seems almost accidental, yet it has a clearly articulated function as a seductive private space: you can imagine picnicking here. For now, the palisade itself commands attention, but in time—maybe within five years, certainly ten—the trees will cover the frame, creating (at least in summer) a leafy retreat, glimpsed through gaps in the surrounding planting.

Dhont’s use of tension works subtly. It is as if a net has been cast over the space, meshing all the elements together. For a new house in Roeselare, Flanders, he built a garden that meets the typical Low Countries challenges—flatness and wetness—head on. Rather than draining or diverting them, natural streams that crisscross the area have been retained, but planted up along their banks in such a way that they gain a sense of purpose. One simple path traverses the site, the tension in this case arising from the subtly varying, jagged spaces between individual paving stones. By the entrance to the house, two huge, sloping piles of bricks from a demolished barn break up a large concourse. They recall the history of the site, but they have, too, a precise function—discouraging visitors from parking right in front of the house.

This is typical, as Dhont believes that any design should be focused on a client’s needs and lifestyle. “My work is more like haute couture, tailored to individual needs,” he says. “Each garden is typical of its place and the people. First, I think of the purpose of the project, then the solution.” Having said that, there is enough creative gumption about the man for him to weave his most favoured, most personal ideas into his designs for private gardens—certainly the ones I’ve seen. The clients may be the heroes, as he claims, but it is still Dhont’s vision, and no other, that leads you up the garden path.

(Andrew Mikolajski has written 20 gardening books. His latest is "Topiares et Sculptures Végétales".)