On my recent visit to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the crowds were there to see Johannes Vermeer.
Photograph by Clare Coulson from Long Barn: Vita Sackville-West’s Starter Garden.
Start with a tonal underpainting.
The Dutch masters primed their palettes with washes of oil and underpainting—tonal or monochromatic—before building up the image with color. At a Dutch garden in Sevenoaks, England, green raised beds, lawn, hedges, and trees create a canvas; the same idea can be applied to silvery or dark foliage.
Take a multilayer approach.
Photograph by Piet Oudolf.
The DeWiersse garden and manor. Seen here, pale yellow hollyhock, red and purple fuschia, blue cornflower, and orange dahlias lead the eye up the steps of the DeWiersse manor in the Netherlands.
Showcase color.
Photograph by James McGrath for The Garden Edit.
Deschampsia cespitosa in Oudolf’s own garden in the Netherlands. Find a space in your garden with that special soft-glow light in the morning or golden haze in the afternoon and optimize your garden’s full aesthetic potential.
Photograph courtesy of My Garden School from Landscape Ideas: 8 Favorite Gardens by Dutch Designer Piet Oudolf.
Paint with light.
Consider a cutting garden.
Photograph by Olivia Rae James for Little Flower School.
A Dutch masters class arrangement by Little Flower School. Prussian blue, a favorite pigment of the Dutch masters, can be achieved with flowers like delphinium, grape hyacinth, and more.
Photograph courtesy of the National Gallery of Art Open Access Database.
Grow fruit trees.
Willem Kalf (Dutch, 1619–1693), Still Life, c. 1660, oil on canvas, Chester Dale Collection 1943.7.8. Still Life, above, by Dutch artist Willem Kalf in 1660, features an orange rind; Kalf gave the rind the most color and light to highlight its natural beauty.
Chef Alice Waters’s compost bucket in her kitchen sink in Berkeley, California. From a kitchen compost full of leaves and rinds to a garden composter full of regenerating decay, the cyclical process of composting is a way to integrate the same vanitas into the gardener’s life.
Photograph by Daniel Dent from A Berkeley Kitchen Tour with Alice Waters and Fanny Singer.
Compost can be beautiful.
Photograph courtesy of the Met Museum Open Access Database.
Plants can grow anywhere.
Ludolf de Jongh (Dutch, Overschie 1616-1679 Hillegersberg), Scene in a Courtyard, early 1660s, oil on canvas, Bequest of William K. Vanderbilt, 1920.
Shown here in the painting, Scene in a Courtyard by Ludolf de Jongh from the early 1660s, a vine trails up the exterior of a house in a Rotterdam neighborhood.
The DeWiersse garden and manor. Great Dutch gardens of past and present show that hyper-symmetrical layouts, be they mazes of hedges, pergola-type structures, or entrance gates, are a consistent feature across time and region.
Structure with symmetry.
Photograph by James McGrath for The Garden Edit.
Plant walls.
Photograph courtesy of the Met Museum Open Access Database.
Jan van der Heyden (Dutch, Gorinchem, 1637–1712, Amsterdam), The Huis Ten Bosch at the Hague and Its Formal Garden (View from the East), ca.
The Dutch have embraced vine-covered facades for centuries, coaxing trailing varieties to cover outbuildings and brick to give interest to otherwise uninteresting facades.