Boek Klup #6: Battlefield and Fabulous Borders,
a close look at gardens
For the last of these summer days, PrintRoom will present works by artist publishers who celebrate plants, gardens, and gardeners. It may help you to plan your next year’s green paradise.
Gabriella Hirst and Jasper Otto Eisenecker will present the publication “Battlefield” followed by a hands-on introduction to the Battlefield garden.
Guus Kaandorp, Floor Kortman and Lou-Lou van Staaveren will present Pleasant Place, Issue 5: Mien Ruys with a short talk by contributor Nicole Martens.
We’ll create our own garden design on PrintRoom’s pavement – using chalk and with Mien Ruys’ design templates in mind.
We’ll serve afternoon tea and snacks, possibly in the garden!
Battlefield is an artist book produced by artist Gabriella Hirst and designer Jasper Otto Eisenecker. It is the printed accompaniment to Gabriella’s Battlefield garden artwork- a garden of plants whose officially registered cultivar names reference theatres of war, armed conflict and the military, which she has been growing since 2014.
The publication tells the stories behind every plant in the Battlefield living garden archive, including excerpts from email correspondence with plant societies, gardening blogs, horticultural archives, plant care tips, personal anecdotes and speculations alongside compiled ephemera and research material gathered from the last decade of the garden. It features essays by curator and researcher Anja Lückenkemper and Gabriella Hirst, and a poster-dust jacket of the planting guide of Battlefield as installed at the Kunsthalle Osnabrück in 2022-23.
Pleasant Place is a growing collection of publications about the art of gardening. Pleasant Place informs and inspires by offering both practical and in-depth information as well as unexpected approaches to everyday garden tasks and garden design. Through collaborations with experts and artists Pleasant Place caters both to those who grow gardens as well as those who imagine gardens.
Pleasant Place #5 is dedicated to garden legend Mien Ruys, one of the most influential garden designers of the 20th century. This issue includes a number of outstanding contributions, among which: an introduction to Mien’s life, designs and awesomeness by garden designer and author Julia Crawford (‘Mien Ruys: Designing the Dutch garden’); a conversation with Pien van der Stadt, who worked alongside Mien Ruys for twenty years (‘A garden like mine made her completely nervous’); a guide on ‘How to create a fabulous border with Mien’s favourite plants’; a personal account by designer Bonne Reijn, who spent his earliest years with his great aunt Mie (‘Dear Mien’); ‘Kleine stadstuintjes’, the interpretation of a small urban garden’s canvas by five artists (Farida Sedoc, Sigrid Calon, Frédérique Albert-Bordenave, Nicole Martens and Vera van de Seyp); and many more!