On Friday, March 28th, we opened the exhibition Mien Ruys and the Modern Garden. This exhibition showcases how garden architect Mien Ruys worked and how her designs were brought to life in various gardens in Amsterdam. A recurring element in her gardens was the perennial borders, which she adapted based on composition, soil type, and the garden’s location. But where did Mien Ruys acquire this vast plant knowledge that she applied in all her designs?

‍

It all starts with where she came from. As the daughter of the owner of the Moerheim nursery in Dedemsvaart, she grew up surrounded by plants and flowers. However, she quickly realized that she did not want to become a grower herself but was more interested in how plants could be used in garden design. After her studies, Ruys started working in the design department of the family business. There, she began setting up model gardens, where she experimented with new plant species. Many of her early experiments failed, but these failures taught her valuable lessons about how soil types and climate affect plant growth.

‍

Today, the gardens in Dedemsvaart still exist and are now open to the public. These gardens clearly showcase Mien Ruys’s evolution as a designer. The first garden she created in Dedemsvaart was the Wilderness Garden in 1924. Almost all the plants died due to the acidic soil, teaching her an important early lesson about matching plants to the right soil conditions. In the Old Model Garden from 1927, she created a traditional border with plants arranged from low to high. In both gardens, the clean lines and grion tiles that Ruys introduced can already be seen in her designs.

‍

Later, she went on to design many other types of gardens, such as the Blue Garden, the Water Garden, the City Garden, and the Grid Garden. Although these gardens now beautifully represent Mien Ruys’s development as a garden architect, she did not think of her own gardens as show gardens. She once said:

‍

"In Dedemsvaart, I never create just one garden. They are simply 25 plots of land where I experiment. Some things turn out quite ugly. These are not show gardens, and visitors might sometimes wonder how I could create something so unattractive. But I feel incredibly lucky to have land where I can tinker."

‍

For Ruys, the model gardens were primarily practical—a place where she could learn about new plant species and their long-term performance. In 1943, she moved her design practice to Amsterdam, but every summer, she returned to Dedemsvaart to continue experimenting in the model gardens. Today, the Tuinen Mien Ruys are a municipal monument, and her three earliest gardens have been designated as national monuments since 2004. The Tuinen Mien Ruys reopened to the public on April 1st.

‍