Tile Garden Appeltern

The theme of the annual garden festival in The Gardens of Appeltern 2012 is The Street as a Garden, for which Karres en Brands designed a five meter high Hortus Exclusus.

The Netherlands is being paved. Millions of square meters of paving materials are processed in our country every year. The pressure on green space in the street is enormous and still rising. More has to happen in less space and under increasingly strict social norms. The green has to give way. In our busy society, city dwellers do not have time to maintain a garden - paving is easier. Scraping in between tiles is the new gardening. There is no more room to appreciate the garden or public space as part of the private living environment. The liveability of public space is at stake.

The Tile Garden (or Paving Stone Garden) comprises an immense volume of standard thirty-by-thirty paving stones, symbolising a paved Netherlands. From a distance, it looks like an archetypal ‘hortus conclusus’ hidden behind a tile wall, an enclosed garden that you can enter. It’s a place where the visitor can enjoy flowers, gurgling water, leafy shade and more. Up close, however, it looks more like a ‘hortus exclusus’, a garden where the visitor remains locked out. Yet, in the narrow spaces between hedge and tiled walls, a different kind of garden is created: a garden of ideas. Sounds of mowing grass, sawing wood, playing children, etc. can be heard from behind the wall, evoking images and memories of enriching experiences that happen in the garden - or in the street.

On red plant labels, visitors can write what they would like to do, see, smell, hear and experience in their street. The inscribed labels are inserted into the cracks and joints of the wall. Gradually, the wall is covered with a red veil of ideas, dreams and fantasies.