Formal thinking

am a plant collector, obsessively so, and this is a plant collector’s garden,” says Olivier Vico, speaking of Domaine du Ooievaar, the garden he has created southwest of Ghent in Belgium. “But, I also like well-designed gardens and I did not want a garden like so many collectors’ gardens, with plants growing together and hundreds of plant labels.” Olivier has succeeded beautifully and, together with his wife Trudy, has made a harmonious garden that sits comfortably in the surrounding landscape, wearing its horticultural credentials lightly. The house, a traditional Flanders farmhouse builtof grand French and Dutch gardens of the 18th century, the courtyard is flanked by pleached limes enclosing a parterre of low box hedges, punctuated, in each quadrant, by yew pyramids. The rigorous formality of the gardens that inspired it, though, is challenged by the exuberant planting within the box-hedged areas, with a vibrant mixture of herbaceous perennials, annuals, grasses and, above all, bulbs ensuring that this part of the garden is full of colour and movement throughout the year.