A Great Park in Vlaams-Brabant

De Tuinen van Hoegaarden is the city park of the little village Hoegaarden in the province Vlaams-Brabant east of Brussels in Belgium. If you travel in this part of Europe a visit in the park is a must. However remember that the park is still under a process of change.

The head gardener Geert Derom and his staff has already made a great work with renovating and developing the old park and still much are on the schedule for the future. So the park will be even more worth the visit in the next couple of years I suppose. In my opinion the staff has to increase in number though, to be able to manage the maintenance of this big and diverse park even in the future.

Here I now publish a cavalcade of pictures to show some of the interesting parts from this wonderful park.

The most interesting plot in the park at the moment is a newly planted prairie inspired garden made by Jan Spruyt. Here the grass Calamagrostis x acutiflora 'Karl Foerster' is dominating and interplay well with a great number of sun loving perennials and other ornamental grasses.

De Tuinen van Hoegaarden

Next week I’m going to Belgium together with my dear wife and our sweet baby boy to meet Jan Spruyt and Geert Derom.

Jan Spruyt runs a very special perennial nursery of great interest in Mostenveld. The assortment is vast and really exciting. I’m also excited myself to finally see the nursery in real life I have heard so much about and even bought plants from to several of my former projects.

Prairie inspired planting by Jan Spruyt

I’ve known Jan for many years and the first time we met was at one of our ISU-meetings, in Germany I think it was. Jan also works with a kind of naturalistic plantings, prairie inspired, with many different perennials and ornamental grasses. These I’m also very curious about.

Geert Derom I don’t know that well yet but also him I’ve met through ISU. He is the head gardener, or Hoofdtuinman as it is called in Dutch or rather Vlaams, of a very interesting park in Hoegaarden in Belgium there I am supposed to create a model garden in the future. In the park, DeTuinen van Hoegaarden, there are already many different model gardens and borders as the shade garden, the exotic garden, the pond garden, the bulb garden and many others. Jan Spruyt has also made a prairie inspired garden there. I’ll come back with a report and hopefully nice pictures from the trip.

In the meantime you can read about the nursery and park here below and I also added a link to ISU, the International Perennial Union.


Jan Spruyt Nursery http://www.vasteplant.be/

Internationale Stauden-Union http://www.isu-perennials.org/site/index.cfm

De Tuinen van Hoegaarden http://www.detuinenvanhoegaarden.be/

Grasses in the winter from one of Jan Spruyt's plantings