Garden club

The garden club is a sub-group of ProParte.

2020 annual report

Adri Gittenberger, Annemarie de Vries and Joke Ploem began 2020 like every year with a lunch at Level to discuss the coming year. As always the mood was inspiring, and we were buzzing with plans for 2020. But along came coronavirus and Adri fell ill with such an awful prognosis that we had to bid her farewell in September 2020.

Only two points from the programme for 2020 could be realised. On 23 July we visited Berbice, a 17th century country estate in Voorschoten. Alongside the main house, Berbice has an orangery, a rose garden and a park designed by Johan David Zocher sr. The estate now belongs to a foundation, and two knowledgeable volunteers gave us particularly interesting tour: one of the park and orangery and the other of the vegetable garden with Pieter de la Court van der Voort’s unique fruit walls.

On 17 September we visited the Zonnehof garden in Aerdenhout, where Marlies ter Borg lives. The visit focused on the ‘resistance bankers’, the Van Hall brothers. They lived in de Zonnehof, also during the German occupation. Their brave and ingenious activities are beautifully depicted in a sculpture by Frans van der Ven. We also visited the monument to the brothers at Kennemer Lyceum. At both Marlies’s house and the monument, we remembered Adri, our inspiration in the gardening club, but above all our dear friend. We ended with a visit to a pick-your-own dahlia garden in Heemstede, and took home a bouquet of the most beautiful dahlias we’d ever seen.

An extra activity was tea in Joke Ploem’s garden on 24 June. Despite the coronavirus rules, socially distancing and separate seating areas, it was a rather special afternoon. We might not have talked about gardens much, but we simply enjoyed a summer’s day in the welcome shade of the garden.

It’s worth mentioning that for the first time ever we received membership requests through the website, although they haven’t yet led to any new members.

We are obviously looking forward to 2021 and hope that we will once again be able to go on our monthly trips.

The next event was a pleasant stay in Hotel De Gouden Karper in Hummelo. After dinner - in spite of some technical problems - we watched the documentary 'Five Seasons' (Piet Oudolf), so that we were well prepared for our visit the following morning to the Oudolf garden, also in Hummelo. In the course of the morning we left for the Open Garden Days in Bingerden, where there was a lot to see, not to mention a lot to buy! 

During the summer months we stayed closer to home:
On 18 July we visited the botanical garden in Delft, that has a noticeably different collection from the Leiden Hortus. The collection in Delft is more focused on applications in construction and industry, whereas in Leiden the botanical garden from its earliest days has always comprised plants that are important for medicine.

We visited the Festina Lente nursery in Katwijk on 16 August, which we combined with a lunch at the Valkenburg Lake.

With fungus expert Hans Adema as our guide, we walked in the Van Duivenvoorde park on 20 September. After the walk, we enjoyed an excellent lunch on the patio of the Hof van Duivenvoorde.

On 18 October we took a walk through the woods of the beautiful Leyduin estate in Vogelenzang, which was at its most beautiful with its carpet of autumn leaves. The path led us along the very special Belvedere and a historic kitchen garden to the Gasterij, where we concluded our Garden Year with a refreshing cup of tea.