I’ll admit it. Until a couple of weeks ago, I had never heard of the garden designer Mien Ruys (1904–99). I was not entirely to blame for my ignorance; next to nothing had been written in English on this Dutch giant of landscape design until Julia Crawford’s Mien Ruys: The Mother of Modernist Gardens was published in November last year. Why that is, nobody seems to know. Perhaps Ruys fell through the gaps between design and horticulture, or perhaps, in Britain at least, the legacy of the Arts & Crafts garden is simply too strong to compete with. Whatever the reason, it is an omission peculiar to the English-speaking world. In the Netherlands, four of her gardens are national monuments, and many internationally renowned horticulturalists such as Piet Ouldorf today recognize Ruys’s gardening and literary legacy as a foundational contribution to the discipline of landscape design.
The names with which Ruys was associated read like a roll call of European modernism. She studied in Berlin when the Bauhaus was in full swing, while, back in the Netherlands, Piet Mondrian, Theo van Doesburg, and their movement, De Stijl, provided Ruys with both design inspiration and future collaborators. Ruys’s Square Garden (1974), with its arresting geometry of tessellating squares in different scales and materials, cannot be understood without the context of these influences, nor can the bold use of primary colors in her Herb Garden (1957). Ruys herself was an active member of De 8, the Dutch counterpart to Le Corbusier’s International Congresses of Modern Architecture, and worked closely with some of the group’s members in the post-war building of new neighborhoods.
Nagele was such a place. The settlement, built in 1948 on three hundred square miles of newly reclaimed polder by architects and designers of the Nieuwe Bouwen movement, was the perfect blank canvas on which the group could test their ideals. Like those of other post-war urban rebuilders, Ruys’s vision was social as well as aesthetic, but rather than imposing a utopia on the occupants from the top down, she wanted her landscaping to reflect the will of the inhabitants. She deliberately delayed implementing much of her design until the architecture was in use so that she could place paths where “desire lines” had already started to form.
In common with many in the modernism movement, Ruys’s social-democratic politics were central to her design philosophy. She often advised Gerrit Rietveld (the architect of Schröder House fame) on the siting and landscaping on his projects. One such example is the furniture factory built for De Ploeg, a colony of left-wing outsiders in Bergeijk (1954–59). Here Ruys worked with Rietveld to enhance the lives of the workers by prioritizing their proximity to green space and embellishing the paths they took to work.
Ruys’s beliefs were deeply held—she assisted in the sheltering of Jews during the Nazi occupation—and the democratization of horticulture and design were central themes of her life. As well as experimenting with the materiality of design (designing concrete pavers, using recycled plastics, and trying out newly invented precast pond liners), Ruys strove to make gardening itself an approachable and affordable occupation for her fellow citizens. Her most transformative innovations to this end were her “rehearsal borders,” developed after the war. Known in Dutch as Confectie (a term taken from fashion commerce meaning “off the peg”), Ruys’s range of five to six preselected plant combinations enabled an average Joe with no gardening experience to choose a fitting border of inexpensive, hardy plants based on soil, wind, and aspect. Like a wallpaper, the planting pattern could be replicated to fit the size of the intended plot. The “catalogue” of different borders could be viewed near Ruys’s nurseries at Dedensvaart, but the product itself could be ordered at various department stores across the country, much like carpet or curtains. The parallels with the work of her colleague Rietveld are striking: his Red and Blue Chair (1917) is a paragon of modernist design, but largely became so thanks to its simplicity and ease of replication—the design uses only standardized dimensions of machined timber. Similarly, Ruys believed that good design should be available to all and, through her pragmatic innovations, turned this philosophy into a reality.
In keeping with Ruys’s philosophy of democratized design, the masterpieces of her career feature simple components that can be found in many millions of similarly sized suburban gardens across Europe. At the Weekend Garden (1950), for example, the basic ingredients—a modest house, patio, and lawn—are transformed with one of Ruys’s favorite techniques. By orienting the patio on the diagonal and having the lawn sweep away from the house in an oblique direction, Ruys thereby places the house at an angle in relation to its setting. This makes the garden feel longer, manufactures a more arresting framing of the house, and creates a zone of real dynamism where the two “orientation fields” meet.
By such imagination, and with the use of humble components, Ruys achieved lasting and popular success. In some ways her legacy is to be found not in the four national monuments in the Netherlands but rather in the many thousands of suburban gardens across Europe that profited from her innovations.
Crawford’s book is a magnificent fanfare for this under-trumpeted master, and it is a joy to see such beautiful photography by Deyan Michev responding so intelligently to the text. Crawford’s contributions are interspersed with commentary from a range of horticultural, familial, and academic voices, reflecting the breadth of Ruys’s influence and appeal. Though Ruys’s life and work cannot be disassociated from the context of twentieth-century modernism, we can still learn so much from her, and this book is a brilliant place to begin.