An Walled Paradise in Antwerp That Blooms Year-Round

The garden is enclosed on all four sides; here, flora nestles right up to a wall.

But these themes are only one layer of the density that makes the garden his. He has cultivated some 500 plant species, along with 5,000 tulips and another 2,000 bulbous flowering plants. There are no ordered beds, no real symmetry. To achieve his vision of an abundant garden of paradise, he has planted most specimens individually rather than in collections, a way of showing nature’s diverse richness. “Through this individual planting,” he says, “I can maximize the variety of species, textures, colors, flowering periods, and foliage contrasts, while simultaneously fitting my use of the garden as a plant lab.”

Every visitor encounters something different. “I strive—and succeed—to have flowers in the garden every single day of the year, thereby giving it an aesthetic appeal even in winter,” he says. Transience, eternity, and perspective have been prized in tales of garden-making since Eden: To seal a garden off from the world is, in fact, to open it vertically toward the endless sky.