Utrecht University botanic gardenS

Rock Garden

Arriving in style using OV-fiets, Dutch bike-share. Note the Arisaema on the sign!

Utrecht University Botanical Garden — The Netherlands

Utrecht University is one of the more respected horticultural research institutions in Europe, and you can feel that seriousness in the collections. Their botanic garden has intention and history.

The rock garden at Utrecht Botanical Garden is situated on top of Fart Hoofddijk (1879), an old defense fort surrounded by a moat. The Rock garden offers a suitable environment to thousands of plant species from mountain areas all over the world. I biked there from the train station last May — a fitting way to arrive in the Netherlands — and spent the better part of the afternoon wandering.

Rock gardens done right have a naturalism that's hard to fake, and this one earned it. One of the special collections of the garden was Arisaema, or Jack-in-the-pulpit. This is one of my favorite plant genera and I was so happy to see such a wide array of them. Juniper Level Botanic Garden in Raleigh, NC grows quite a wide array of Ariseama as well and the staff I met seemed to be connected with Tony Avent of JLBG. Equally compelling were the slopes planted in peat blocks, a tradition which started decades ago to provide a moist and acidic environment for newly discovered plant collections from abroad.

The Native American plant collection was an unexpected highlight — a reminder that a garden an ocean away can still feel connected to familiar plants seen through a completely different lens. I had a special moment with a Calycanthus x raulstonii ‘Hartlage Wine’ that was bred at JC Raulston arboretum by an NCSU student in 1991. The tropical greenhouses offered a fantasy of a tropical summer compared to the cool Dutch spring. If you are lucky you will find small frogs or butterflies roaming about.

A garden absolutely worth the bike ride.