About
Garden designer
Dutch by origin, with over 20 years of experience in garden design, planting design, and high-level horticultural maintenance. The Rose and the Dragon is my company. For the service I provide, I work in close collaboration with a select group of trusted garden companies, a technical architect, builders, masons, and electricians to build and maintain beautiful gardens, each adding their specialism. Therefore, each garden is the result of a joint process, involving professionals who have consistently demonstrated their expertise and reliability, and who share the same vision.
Over the years, I’ve come to realise that gardens are only partially created through design. Gardens are living entities; plants grow and change, trees reach for the sky and cast new shadows, and shrubs expand, often leaving bare spaces at their base. This evolution requires not only a clever design but, even more importantly, skilled maintenance with a keen aesthetic sense to see opportunities, adapt the plan, and keep the garden looking fresh and beautiful. I therefore work, as a designer, in close collaboration with the maintenance teams to guide the development of the garden into maturity.
Diederik Schwaanhuyser
Philosophy
I think we are still strongly connected to the natural world around us. One of the most important functions of a garden is to bring a little of that beautiful, complex world to our immediate surroundings, bridging our daily life to what can feed and comfort us.
My aim is always to create a garden that has a unique, natural feel to it, of course within the framework of the design and the requirements of maintenance.
