The Wirtz Private Garden

Book excerpt: Few landscape designers are more admired than Belgium's Jacques Wirtz (born 1924), as evidenced by the huge success of The Wirtz Gardens, which surveyed 57 private and public gardens designed by Wirtz, many in collaboration with his two sons, Martin and Peter, in locations around the world. Like the veteran art dealer whose personal collection one imagines to be stupendous, the volume raised the question of what Wirtz's own garden looked like. The Wirtz Private Garden, first published in 2009 and now back in print, answers that question. At the family home in Schoten, near Antwerp--a former gardener's cottage attached to an 18th-century estate--Wirtz and his family have created a laboratory for experimenting with plants, shrubbery, borders and pathways on an intimate scale. Documented in this volume in beautiful photographs by Marco Valdivia, the Wirtz family gardens become the stage for a unique meditation on the subtle effects of light, space and form as they change through the seasons. Valdivia, shooting on film, is uniquely sensitive to the Wirtz aesthetic and to the textures of nature, making this now-classic volume one of the finest photographic studies of an intimate garden ever published.