Sometime in the late 1980s, an employee of the then National Planning Service rescued Eo Wijers’ famous drawing for the Second Memorandum on Spatial Planning from a rubbish skip. Landscape architect Pieter Buys currently stores his personal and professional archives in a shed and has no plans for their long-term preservation. And an employee of the Forestry Commission prevented the documentation of the Planting Commission from being put out with the rubbish. Where are those materials now, 30 years later? At some point, a new generation of landscape designers and managers will have to find a suitable location to store valuable archival materials. But even now, there is no obvious destination for them.

Dutch garden and landscape architecture have made a significant contribution to the landscape around us. This contribution is recorded in sketches, maps, photographs and models, and described in meeting minutes, policy documents and articles. Together, these documents provide an insight into how the landscape is conceived, created and managed, and thus also furnish us with insights into society itself, whose culture and customs are ultimately and inevitably expressed in the landscape. For a good understanding of the landscape and how best to use it, it is of great practical and cultural importance that these materials are preserved and made accessible for education, research, design and management.

No home for garden and landscape architecture archives

In contrast to the situation for architecture and urban design, for garden and landscape architecture archives there is no obvious “home”: the materials are stored in a fragmented fashion at a variety of archival institutions. There are various organisations that play an important role in specific areas that relate to the landscape, such as the National Archives, Het Nieuwe Instituut, WUR Special Collections, regional and municipal archives, public organisations such as the National Forestry Commission and the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands, and of course the design studios themselves. But the number of neglected and destroyed archives shows that the current options are limited and that we need an integrated vision for collecting these archives. 

In 2018, following a meeting with Het Nieuwe Instituut, the Board of Government Advisers put the situation regarding garden and landscape architecture archives on the agenda of the Minister of Education, Culture and Science. This was necessary because the management of, and access to, the archives of (and for) landscape architecture are not adequately organised. Archives are in danger of disappearing due to the reorganisation of institutions and the dynamic development of design offices.

The Ministry of Education, Culture and Science has asked Het Nieuwe Instituut to investigate a potential collection policy for garden and landscape architecture archives. As the guardian of the National Collection for Dutch Architecture and Urban Planning, Het Nieuwe Instituut has extensive knowledge of, and experience in, collecting, managing and providing access to the archives of architects, urban planners and designers. The collection of Het Nieuwe Instituut also contains archives and archival documents relating to garden and landscape design.

Het Nieuwe Instituut, like its predecessors, has always collected from the perspectives of architecture and urbanism. This has meant that garden and landscape architecture have not been collected as autonomous disciplines, but as components of the fields of architecture and urban planning. For example, Het Nieuwe Instituut has collected designs for large urban parks or public gardens as part of urban planning designs (including the archives of Alle Hosper and Michael van Gessel), and designs for cities, large urban parks and public spaces with a strong landscaping component (such as the archives of Cornelis van Eesteren and Frits Palmboom). While this perspective on garden and landscape architecture certainly provides insights into the interactions between architecture, urban design and landscape design over the decades, it also means that the development of specific areas of knowledge within the field, such as botany, land development, agriculture, geography, cultivation techniques and ecology, have largely been omitted from this collection policy.

Apart from the question as to who is served by this separation of knowledge areas, the future of an integrated policy with regard to the preservation of garden and landscape designs is also wrapped up in larger current issues such as the Anthropocene and how current and future stakeholders in the landscape deal with the relationship between humans, nature and the environment. The study currently being conducted concerns not only the archives of garden and landscape architects, but also those of other bodies involved in the creation, layout and design of the landscape, such as water boards and nature organisations. It is important to gain an insight into this broader field of relevant actors and to ascertain which structure of archive repositories is most appropriate.