Van der Kloet has worked alongside her compatriot, garden designer Piet Oudolf, to incorporate bulbs into New York City’s Battery Park which we feature in Piet Oudolf and Dr Noel Kingsbury’s latest course here at Learning with Experts.
Longevity is a kind of sustainability, and that may be one reason van der Kloet’s designs have caught on. Jacqueline has had commissions around the world, including a ten-acre renovation of beds at Holland’s Keukenhof, one of the largest public flower gardens in the world. The projects she’s done in the United States have met with resounding success. Van der Kloet collaborated with Oudolf again in Chicago’s Millennium Park in 2007, followed by a stint at the New York Botanical Garden’s Seasonal Walk, in 2008. TV host and author Martha Stewart unveiled her at her New York, home, which includes 116,000 bulbs, all in shades of blue and distributed by van der Kloet’s signature “sprinkling,” which means handfuls of bulbs are lovingly tossed onto the ground, to be planted where they fall.
Botanically speaking, ‘bulbs’ is a collective name which tubers, corms and rhizomes alongside tulips and narcissi. This course covers how to plant spring flowering bulbs in the naturalistic style used by Van der Kloet and Oudolf: bulbs that are planted in autumn, go through a cold period in winter and start to flower in spring. The first lesson features all kinds of other spring flowering bulbs (except tulips) which can cheer up our gardens, from early to late spring, like snow drops, grape hyacinths and ornamental onions, to name a few.
