Dutch Wave Gardens Tour 2027: Piet Oudolf & Naturalistic Planting

Arrive in Amsterdam and settle into DoubleTree by Hilton Amsterdam Centraal Station, our base for the first four nights. Today gives you time to rest after your journey before the garden programme begins tomorrow. We will return to the same hotel after our first excursions, with a day in Amsterdam before moving on to Rotterdam.

Join your fellow travellers for a welcome dinner at the hotel. Some will arrive with favourite plants and particular questions about Oudolf’s work; others will be looking forward to the gardens, art and places we encounter. Those different interests bring plenty to the conversation as we get acquainted.

The week takes us into the Dutch late-summer garden, where grasses and perennials have developed the height and presence that photographs of spring cannot convey. We will see gardens created for different purposes and on different scales, from private planting around a home to Oudolf’s public garden at Vlinderhof. Each adds something to our understanding of the movement and its continuing influence.

Our first garden day begins at Het Turfhof in Lisserbroek. A perennial-growing business and a trial garden behind the barn lie behind the garden we see today. Its planting changes through the year, with summer flowers giving way to warmer colours and flowering grasses as autumn approaches.

Spent stems are left standing through winter, providing food and shelter for small insects before the perennials are cut back late in winter. During our September visit, flowers and developing seedheads may be present together. The changing forms give the planting continuity: a flower’s colour can fade while its outline remains part of the border.

The connection with growing is an engaging place to begin the tour. Plants can be appreciated as individual specimens and as part of a larger group, with their neighbours bringing different qualities to the fore. Grasses introduce movement among more substantial stems and leaves, while the changing season draws attention to the plants that hold their shape.

At Waterside Garden in Boskoop, we enter a peninsula beside the De Lansing nature area. Olga and Arno Rijnbeek created the garden in 2022 as an experimental display for a perennial nursery. The garden moves between shaded planting, prairie-style borders and other garden settings, each with its own combinations.

The prairie-style area includes baptisias, crocosmias, asters and salvias among grasses, using plants familiar from Oudolf’s work with the owners’ own interpretation. Woodland plants bring a quieter atmosphere elsewhere, while different border styles broaden the palette. The variety makes this a garden of changing spaces, held together by its waterside setting.

Our programme includes a boat trip and lunch. From the water, Boskoop’s landscape unfolds at a gentler pace, providing a pause between the garden visits and our return to Amsterdam. Over lunch there is time to exchange the first discoveries of the week, from an unfamiliar plant to a combination worth remembering. Dinner is included at the hotel this evening.

At De Tuin van Fortmond, a modern house stands among groups of tall perennials and ornamental grasses. The building gives the garden a clear architectural presence, while the planting introduces softer outlines and seasonal movement around it.

Tall plants can change the experience of a garden as much as its appearance. A group closes one view and opens another; a grass lets light and glimpses of planting pass through its stems. At Fortmond, those changing forms are experienced alongside the fixed lines of the house. It is a garden in which the relationship between building and planting is central to the visit.

We continue to Tuinen Mien Ruys in Dedemsvaart, where more than thirty garden spaces record a long history of experiment. Ruys began in the grounds of her parents’ perennial nursery, developing ideas that occupied her throughout her design career. The Wilderness Garden, laid out in 1924, is the earliest of a sequence that grew over subsequent decades.

Moving from one garden to the next reveals the breadth of that work. Different spaces bring different proportions, planting relationships and experiences of enclosure. The garden becomes an account of ideas tested on the ground, where a path, boundary or change in level can be experienced directly.

For anyone interested in the Dutch Wave, the visit adds an earlier chapter to the story. It places perennial planting within a longer tradition of experiment and close attention to plants. The individual gardens also offer ideas on a scale familiar to many visitors: the organisation of a smaller space, the value of a clear framework and the balance between an open area and abundant planting.

Our third visit is Tuin Polhuis in Ermelo, a garden around a farmhouse with colour-based borders and unusual perennial combinations. Salvias and dahlias are used in pots and among the planting, helping extend its interest into autumn. Here the emphasis is on the pleasure of bringing plants together around a home.

After the architectural setting of Fortmond and the experimental sequence at Mien Ruys, Polhuis provides a more domestic conclusion to the day. Different colours, growth habits and textures give the borders their character, with late-season planting adding another layer. We return to Amsterdam, where you are free to choose your own restaurant for dinner.

Enjoy a free morning in Amsterdam. Take a walk, explore a neighbourhood or settle into a café and watch the city go about its day. Lunch is at your own arrangement before we come together for a guided visit to the Rijksmuseum.

The museum brings Dutch art and history into the journey through works in its collection and the stories behind them. After two full garden days, it offers a change of setting and time to follow interests beyond horticulture. Our guided visit provides an introduction, making the experience rewarding whether the museum is familiar to you or this is your first visit.

Looking at art can also sharpen an appreciation of gardens. Colour, light and the placement of forms influence the way a painting is experienced, just as their relationships shape a view through planting. The museum gives us another perspective to carry into the garden visits ahead, while remaining a pleasure in its own right.

We also take a canal cruise, with drinks and light snacks included. The city is seen from a different level as its buildings and waterways pass by, and there is time to relax together after the museum. Dinner is at your own arrangement this evening.

Tomorrow we leave our Amsterdam base, visiting gardens in the east before continuing to Rotterdam.

We leave Amsterdam for Jelle Grintjes’s landscape garden in Herwen. His 5,000-square-metre show garden brings together perennials and grasses in combinations ranging from naturalistic to deliberately unexpected. Plants give the landscape much of its character, with differences in height and texture creating variety within the planting.

A relaxed appearance can contain considerable thought. Stronger forms give the eye places to settle, while finer plants introduce transparency and movement. The pleasure comes from seeing the combinations at garden scale, where a plant’s relationship with its neighbours is as apparent as its individual qualities.

Grintjes’s garden gives us time to explore that balance between abundance and composition. Some visitors will be drawn to particular plants, others to the effect of the whole planting. Both approaches can yield ideas, especially when a combination is considered in terms of shape and growth rather than copied without regard to conditions at home.

Lunch is included at Grand Café De Markt in Zevenaar. Afterwards, we continue to Groot Daatselaar in Renswoude, the garden of Hans Gieszen and Yuxian Sun. Their naturalistic planting allows tall and low plants to mingle, creating depth within the same area.

The mixed heights give the borders a different character from planting arranged in a steady rise from front to back. Taller forms appear among lower neighbours, while openings towards the surrounding landscape extend the view beyond the garden. The result invites the eye to travel through the planting as well as across its surface.

Seen together, today’s gardens show how individual naturalistic design can be. The same broad interest in perennials and grasses leads to different choices about mixing, repetition and openness. Those differences make the visits particularly useful for gardeners finding their own way with plants, and enjoyable for anyone who appreciates a garden’s atmosphere.

We continue to DoubleTree by Hilton Rotterdam Centre, our base for the next two nights. Dinner is included this evening.

Today brings us to the two Piet Oudolf gardens at the heart of the tour. Singer Laren combines planting with contemporary sculpture; Vlinderhof brings an Oudolf garden into the everyday life of a public park. Visiting them together allows us to experience how his work responds to two different places.

At Singer Laren, a former private landscape garden has become a sculpture garden, with Oudolf’s planting connecting the museum, villa and theatre. Works by contemporary Dutch artists introduce fixed forms among plants that develop and change through the seasons. Culture and nature provide a recurring relationship within the garden and its sculptures.

A work may be seen first through planting, then more fully as we approach. Elsewhere, open space allows its outline to stand clearly against its surroundings. The sculpture and the plants contribute together to the experience, with changes in the planting altering the view over the year.

In September, the interest can include flowers still carrying colour and the forms left by earlier flowering. Grasses bring a finer texture alongside more solid stems and leaves. The planting gives us a chance to see Oudolf’s attention to a plant’s whole character, including qualities that remain after its brightest flowering moment.

We continue to Vlinderhof in Utrecht’s Máximapark. Created through a residents’ initiative and maintained by volunteers, this public garden contains more than 15,000 perennials and grasses. Oudolf arranged sunny planting areas, shaded spaces and taller borders within a framework of organically shaped hedges and grass paths.

The garden offers specific examples of the contrasts that make his planting so engaging. Its planting account describes the flat yellow heads of Achillea ‘Moonshine’ beside the purple flowers of Salvia verticillata ‘Purple Rain’ and the open blooms of Geranium ‘Rozanne’. Grasses provide transparency around firmer forms such as Echinacea ‘Fatal Attraction’ and Eryngium yuccifolium. Each brings a different shape and texture to the group.

The tall Eupatorium ‘Snowball’ recurs across the beds, drawing the eye between areas of planting. Hedges give the garden an enclosing frame, while the paths allow us to move around the groups and see them from different directions. A plant that dominates a close view may become a repeated accent when seen across the garden.

These relationships are best experienced on foot. Walking around a bed reveals layers that a single photograph may flatten: plants partly obscuring one another, an opening through stems, or a repeated form appearing farther away. The changing viewpoint is part of the garden’s pleasure.

The volunteer care is also part of Vlinderhof’s story. Planting continues to develop after the design is made, with decisions about maintenance helping sustain its character. The garden’s approach includes retaining dried plants into winter, allowing their forms to remain part of the seasonal experience.

Individual flowering varies from year to year, but the structure, combinations and movement through the garden give us plenty to enjoy. We return to Rotterdam after a day devoted to Oudolf’s work, with dinner at your own arrangement.

Our final garden day begins at Tom de Witte’s garden. His interest in perennials and ornamental grasses brings another contemporary designer’s perspective to the programme. After yesterday’s two Oudolf gardens, this is an opportunity to enjoy a different response to planting and place.

Layering is an important part of de Witte’s approach. Plants are experienced in relation to those beside and behind them, with their changing heights and textures contributing to the whole. A personal garden also brings the design close to everyday use, where the pleasure of living among plants and the development of the planting are considered together.

By this stage of the week, we have encountered a wide range of gardens. Some visitors may find themselves noticing repetition more readily; others may be drawn to the plants that create depth or to the spaces between them. The final visits bring those observations into another setting and leave room for further discoveries.

Lunch is included at Strandpaviljoen BRAZ before we visit Kwekerij In Goede Aarde. The nursery specialises in border perennials and ornamental grasses, and its own garden shows the plants in mature combinations. Here the qualities of an established plant can be appreciated alongside the range offered by the nursery.

The owners value lasting structure and a long period of interest. Contrasts between substantial and fine foliage, and between different colours, contribute to the garden’s character. Grasses and late-season flowers help carry the planting into autumn. It is a fitting final visit for a journey concerned with the life of a garden beyond a single flowering display.

Seeing plants established together also brings a practical pleasure. A choice made for a home garden can be imagined through its eventual shape and the contribution it might make among existing neighbours. Even when different conditions call for different plants, the relationships within a successful combination can provide ideas to take away.

We travel to Amsterdam for a farewell dinner at Restaurant Blauw. Over our final meal together, there is time to exchange favourite moments and the planting ideas that have stayed with us. We then continue to Hilton Amsterdam Airport Schiphol for our last night.

Depart from Schiphol according to your onward travel arrangements.

The week has brought together Oudolf’s public planting, the experiments of Mien Ruys, private gardens and the knowledge of growers. You leave with a varied picture of Dutch perennial garden-making, alongside photographs, plant notes and ideas to adapt to your own conditions. The company and conversations along the way are part of the journey too.