Jacques Wirtz (born December 31, 1924, Antwerp, Belgium—died July 21, 2018, Schoten) was a Belgian landscape designer who created more than 100 gardens and was hailed as one of the most talented and influential landscape designers in Europe.
When Wirtz was 12 years old, he moved with his family from Antwerp to an area outside the city, where he was deeply influenced by the natural beauty of the countryside. He studied landscape architecture at a horticultural college in Vilvoorde before starting his own business growing and selling flowers and maintaining local gardens. In 1950 Wirtz designed his first complete garden, in a style inspired by the gardens of his childhood as well as by those he had seen on visits to other European countries and to Japan. As Wirtz created more gardens, he came to be known for designs that complemented instead of concealing the natural surroundings; he favoured flowering plants, grasses, clipped trees and hedges, and water rather than the man-made materials that adorned many other modern gardens.
Wirtz’s career received a boost in the 1970s after he won a competition to design the garden for Belgium’s pavilion at the International Exhibition in Ōsaka, Japan. During this time he also designed the campus of the University of Antwerp, a plan that featured an ivy ground cover and an abundance of flowering trees. Wirtz gained wider recognition in the early 1990s when he won a contest to redesign the Carrousel Garden, which connected the Louvre Museum in Paris with the 63-acre (25-hectare) Tuileries Gardens, redesigned in 1664 by the celebrated French landscape architect André Le Nôtre.
Wirtz continued to work in the early 2000s, usually with one or both of his two sons, who shared in his business. Among the most significant of his projects were Jubilee Park at London’s Canary Wharf, the planting of which was completed in 2002, and the 12-acre (5-hectare) walled garden at Alnwick Castle in Northumberland. A spectacular undertaking featuring waterfalls and Wirtz’s famous mass plantings of geometric-shaped hedges of beech, box, hornbeam, and yew, the Alnwick Garden was under construction for most of the first decade of the 21st century.
Kinkaku Temple, Kyōto, JapanGarden of the Kinkaku Temple showing the use of a shelter structure, the Golden Pavilion, as the main focal point of a landscape design, 15th century, Kyōto.
landscape architecture, the development and decorative planting of gardens, yards, grounds, parks, and other planned green outdoor spaces. Landscape gardening is used to enhance nature and to create a natural setting for buildings, towns, and cities. It is one of the decorative arts and is allied to architecture, city planning, and horticulture.
Jeanne Gang on the future of architectureDesigner of Aqua Tower, the St. Regis Chicago, and the Lincoln Park Nature Boardwalk, Jeanne Gang is one of the best-known contemporary architects in the world.
Landscape architects begin with the natural terrain and enhance, re-create, or alter existing landforms. “Garden” generally connotes a smaller, more intensively cultivated area, frequently created around a domestic building or other small structure. “Landscape” denotes a larger area such as a park, urban area, campus, or roadside.
Trees, bushes, shrubs, hedges, flowers, grasses, water (lakes, streams, ponds, and cascades), and rocks are used to alter or create a pleasing natural setting. Such artificial devices as decks, terraces, plazas, pavement, fences, gazebos, and fountains are also used. The importance of man-made components relative to natural components varies according to the designer, the purpose of the particular site, and the prevailing culture and fashion.
Garden and landscape designs can vary conceptually between classical/symmetrical and natural/romantic, formality and informality, utility and pleasure, and private and public. An enclosed patio garden with tubs, baskets of plants, and paving contrasts with the large “natural” garden popular in 18th-century England, where man-made elements were less visible.
A garden or landscape’s aesthetic aspects include form, plants, colour, scent, size, climate, and function. Gardens need continual maintenance in order to keep weeds and other unwanted natural phenomena from asserting themselves. Gardens change with the seasons and climate and with their plants’ cycle of growth and decay.
Historically, gardens have been designed more for private than for public pleasure. The ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans each evolved their own characteristic garden designs. Hadrian’s Villa, near Tivoli, Italy, contains a vast pleasure garden that had great influence on subsequent designs. The Italian Renaissance developed formal gardens in which the outdoor landscape was considered an extension of a building. The 16th-century Villa d’Este at Tivoli is a remarkable example.
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In the 17th century André le Nôtre, influenced by the Italian Renaissance, created for Louis XIV of France gardens at Versailles in which symmetry, vistas, and grandiose fountains predominated. Such a design was much copied and perhaps matched human dominance over natural landscape. These classical gardens are beautiful but immaculate, formal, hard, elaborate, and logical, with straight lines, circles, trees, and hedges tamed into geometric shapes and with compartmentalized beds for flowers. They are extensions of contemporary architecture.
In 18th-century England the Earl of Burlington and the landscape gardeners William Kent, Lancelot “Capability” Brown, and Humphrey Repton brought about a change whereby a “natural” philosophy of garden design began to recommend the irregular and informal. Late in the century artificial ruins and grottoes were cultivated as picturesque accessories. Famous examples include the gardens at Rousham, Stowe, and Stourhead. In the 19th century in the United States the leading figure in garden and landscape design was Frederick Law Olmsted.
In the East a completely separate tradition of landscape gardening evolved, starting in China and spreading via Korea to Japan. The Oriental attitude to the garden was closely linked to religious traditions. The garden was designed to induce a certain state of mind and enhance a distinctive perception. Nature predominated over man-made symmetry. Rocks were especially important and in Japanese gardens were religious symbols. The scale tended to be smaller than in Western gardens, with emphasis on tiny details. Water, trees, and bridges were vital elements. The Japanese tea garden was supposed to induce a suitable mood in the person approaching a teahouse to participate in the tea ceremony. Oriental landscape gardening, particularly Japanese, has exerted considerable influence on modern Western designs.
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The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. "landscape architecture". Encyclopedia Britannica, 7 Nov. 2023, https://www.britannica.com/art/landscape-architecture. Accessed 31 May 2025.
