Mien Ruys: The Mother of Modernist Gardens by Julia Crawford. Lund Humphries, London, 2023. 144 pp. $79.99 list, $56.42 Amazon.
Mien Ruys was an influential garden designer pioneering the modernist style. She designed over 3,000 gardens from 1923 until her death in 1999, primarily in her native Netherlands. Her plans used clean, modern lines coupled with a naturalistic planting style that emphasized perennials. She worked with many of the Dutch architects of her time and influenced later garden designers including Piet Oudolf, James van Sweden, and many others.
I found this book to be a good introduction to Mien Ruys. Filled with luscious photographs, each chapter focuses on one aspect of Ruys’ work. She used squares, rectangles, and circles in her designs, often in repeating and overlapping shapes. Her signature oblique lines often made the best use of a small space, with her garden plans sometimes rotated about 30 degrees, placing them in juxtaposition with surrounding structures. Her innovative materials included railroad timbers, plastic lumber, concrete tiles, pond liners, and large ornamental balls used as water fountains. These all are commonplace or outdated today but were innovative choices in her time.
Ruys worked closely with architects. She believed that a building should be connected to its surrounding landscape, now a common principle. She designed the gardens for many large public buildings, factories, and postwar villages.
For me, the most interesting discussions in the book were around Ruys’ intimate knowledge of plants, beginning with her youthful experiences at her parents’ Moerheim plant nurseries. Gerturde Jekyll’s love of color was another early influence. Ruys studied the behavior of plants throughout her life, creating thirty “Experimental” gardens at her home and continually reworking them to explore new ideas. These gardens are still maintained today by a foundation. An upcoming Timber Press release, titled “The Gardens of Mien Ruys,” is authored by Conny den Hollander, the head of the Mien Ruys Gardens. I am hoping for a more in-depth discussion of Ruys’ designs.
Deborah Banks maintains a large garden in the Catskill foothills above Oneonta, NY. She is a member of ACNARGS, HPS/MAG and the New England chapter of the American Primrose Society, none of which is near where she lives.