Roy Damen

Tuin en Tuinier van de Peelrandbreuk

Garden and gardener of the Peelrandbreuk 

The project starts with my childhood in the village of Liessel, North Brabant, a village between dry and wet landscapes, between dry forests and the peat bog area De Peel. Separated from each other by a geological fault line that is almost invisible on the surface but 350 million years old: the Peelrandbreuk.    

With the garden as a framework of thought and a spatial phenomenon in which man shapes nature, the gardener literally and figuratively searches for the fault line. The garden's design forms a future story consisting of four garden rooms in the landscape, based on natural and social themes around the fault line: peat, wijst, groundwater and desire. Within these garden rooms, the gardener makes invisible processes visible and anchors us as humans in deep time scales of the Peelrandbreuk.     

The garden of Peelrandbreuk is a spatial narrative consisting of four chapters in the spatial area of the fault line. The chapters form points or moments in the landscape where geological history and cultural history intersect. The garden's boundary is formed by a person's thoughts in the area and their dealings with the soil. By the hand of the gardener, the person learns to know the fault again.     

Working on this project has allowed me to build a new relationship with the fault and the place I come from. You could say that I am the gardener in the story and my role as a landscape architect comes to life in the garden. By diving into the underground and rediscovering the fault line, I took a position within the project of waking something up instead of making it, giving time and space, moving along with it, and literally bringing people into the story of the landscape. 
 

Graduation date: 13 December 2022
Graduation committee: Saline Verhoeven (mentor), Paul de Kort, Erik de Jong
Additional members for the exam: Maike van Stiphout, Remco van der Togt