Pleasant Place No. 5: Mien Ruys traces the life and legacy of Dutch landscape architect Mien Ruys (1904–1999), whose work bridged modernist design principles and the New Perennial Movement that continues to shape garden design today.
About This Book
Born into a horticultural family in Overijssel, where her father ran an internationally renowned plant nursery, Mien Ruys grew up immersed in planting and garden culture before formalising her practice as a garden designer. Her engagement with modernism — specifically its conviction that good design should be available to all — distinguished her approach and placed her alongside figures such as Piet Oudolf as a pioneer of the New Perennial Movement. This issue of the Pleasant Place series dedicates its pages entirely to Ruys, weaving together biographical material, garden designs, and personal accounts into a compact but substantive portrait of a practitioner whose influence on landscape and garden architecture remains significant.
Key Features
- 36 pages of biographical text, garden designs, and personal accounts
- Published by Pleasant Place, 1999
What You'll Discover
- How Ruys's upbringing within a professional horticultural nursery in Overijssel shaped her design sensibility and lifelong engagement with planting
- The relationship between her practice and the modernist movement's democratic design philosophy — good design for all, not just the privileged
- Her place within the New Perennial Movement alongside contemporaries such as Piet Oudolf, and what distinguished her contribution to that lineage
- Personal accounts that situate Ruys not only as a designer but as a cultural figure within twentieth-century European garden and landscape history
About the Author
[Details available upon request]
Specifications
- Format: Softcover
- Pages: 36
- Dimensions: 180 x 245 mm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9789083284347
- Publisher: Pleasant Place
- Publication Date: 1999
Perfect For: Landscape architects, garden designers, and design historians with an interest in modernist garden traditions, the New Perennial Movement, and twentieth-century European planting culture.