Jacqueline van der Kloet
Garden Designer and Plant Specialist

Weesp, the Netherlands

Jacqueline van der Kloet is an internationally-acclaimed garden designer. She is a plant specialist whose advice is sought by other designers and landscape architects. Her designs are prized for bold use of color and magical plant combinations that subtly echo what is seen in nature. In her hands, mixes of flower bulbs, perennials and flowering shrubs become quietly stylish with an irrepressible playfulness that defies formality.

Jacqueline began her career as a designer of private residential gardens. Today, her client list includes some of the most prestigious public gardens in the world. In the U.S., she has teamed with Piet Oudolf for innovative plantings at New York’s Battery Park, New York Botanical Garden and Chicago’s Lurie Garden. Her work across Europe and Asia ranges from Holland’s famous Keukenhof, to the palace Huis ten Bosch in Nagasaki, Japan to the Newport Bay Club at Disneyland, Paris.

She is a graduate of the Royal Horticultural Institute for Garden and Landscape Architecture in Boskoop, the Netherlands and of the Provincial Institute for Horticultural Studies in Anderlecht, Belgium.

A Year in My Garden

In her 10th book, released in the U.S. in 2020, Jacqueline shares a relaxed and highly personal tour of her own garden of 35 years, dishing out meticulous observations, month by month, September through August. For gardeners, it’s a delightful peek at the role played by her own garden as a source of joy and a site for design experimentation.

Excerpt:
Apart from the fact that it is always nice to have a beautiful garden, it has also become clear to me over the years that this garden means much more to me than that. It is also my lifeblood, because I couldn’t live without a garden – and particularly this garden. When I’m working outside, I almost feel sorry for visitors who ask me if it isn’t an awful lot of work to maintain this garden. They don’t realise that I derive a huge amount of energy from it, as well as essential inspiration for my work. The garden and I live in a sort of symbiosis; I look after the garden and constantly make decisions in pursuit of an ideal. And the garden responds – sometimes in very surprising ways – and that again is the power of nature.

van der Kloet, Jacqueline. A Year in My Garden, Amsterdam, Hélène Lesger Books, © 2019