Neighbourhood in Amsterdam-Noord
Gardener in Landelijk Noord
What makes a garden in Landelijk Noord different from one three streets away, and what that means for what goes into the ground.
Noord district, Amsterdam
What to reckon with in Landelijk Noord
- Five villages: Durgerdam, Holysloot, Ransdorp, Schellingwoude and Zunderdorp, across 27.8 square kilometres.
- 945 homes, 83 per cent single-family and 77 per cent owner-occupied. Plots here are yards, not city gardens.
- A peat layer two to six metres thick, thickest at Durgerdam, compressing six to ten millimetres a year at sixty centimetres drainage depth.
- Durgerdam, Holysloot and Ransdorp are protected village conservation areas; the province asks for native, restrained planting.
Landelijk Noord is 27.8 square kilometres holding 945 homes across five villages: Durgerdam, Holysloot, Ransdorp, Schellingwoude and Zunderdorp. Durgerdam, Holysloot and Ransdorp are protected village conservation areas. What people have here is not a garden but a yard: 83 per cent single-family, 77 per cent owner-occupied, and plots many times the size of a city garden elsewhere in Noord.
The ground is the subject here. Under Waterland lies a peat layer two to six metres thick, thickest around Durgerdam, and it is still compressing. With the water table sixty centimetres below the surface that runs at six to ten millimetres a year; with a higher water table, considerably less. This is not abstract. It is why the timber houses in Ransdorp were built light, so they would not sink into soft ground, and it is why a heavy terrace on Dorpsweg Ransdorp or Poppendammergouw develops a wave within a decade.
The province of North Holland asks for restrained, locally native planting in this landscape and names alder specifically as a local tree; it also asks that open land be kept as free of planting as possible. We hold to that, including when a dense conifer hedge is what is asked for. Along Durgerdammerdijk, Liergouw and Zunderdorpergouw we work with alder, willow, hawthorn and hazel, and with the ditch as the boundary rather than a fence.
Closed over at most
50%
We will not build a garden that is more than half hard surface. On this ground the water has to go somewhere.
Lead time
3 to 6
Working days for a garden up to a hundred square metres, spread over two weeks.
We come back within
12mo
Anything we plant that fails to take, we replace within a year at no cost.
What we come to Landelijk Noord for
Garden renovationThe whole garden out and back in, with a scale drawing before the first spade goes in.
Paving and terraceWhy a terrace goes out of level here, and what has to sit underneath to stop it.
Planting and bordersWhat takes on wet peat soil, and what is gone again within three years.
Pruning and hedgesHedges, shrubs and trees, and what does and does not need a permit in Amsterdam.
Garden maintenanceFour fixed rounds a year, with what happens in each of them written down.
First whether it can be done, then what it costs
Photograph the spot where the water stands. That answers half the question on its own.
Questions from Landelijk Noord
Why do you advise against a conifer hedge here?
For two reasons, and the first is not about taste. A dense evergreen hedge two metres high on an open peat meadow plot blocks the wind in a place where wind keeps the ground dry and healthy, and it roots shallowly in soil that moves. The second reason is that the province explicitly asks for native planting in this landscape and wants the open land kept clear. A mixed hedge of hawthorn and hazel does the same job and belongs here.
My yard is settling unevenly. Should I have it raised?
Raising is nearly always temporary here and sometimes expensive. Every cubic metre of sand added presses the peat beneath it further together, so you buy a few years and then speed the process up. What does work is building light: a terrace on a load-bearing base rather than on sand, and paths that can be relifted without anything having to come out. We tell you how many years each option is expected to hold.
Do you work on farmyards as well as houses?
On the green part, yes: yard planting, pollarding, hedges, orchards and ditch banks. What we do not do is hard surfacing for heavy agricultural traffic; that needs a different base than the one we build, and you are better served by a contractor who does that work. We would rather say so on the first phone call than at handover.
The other neighbourhoods we work in
Your request
Six fields and a photo. With the area and the type of garden we can name a band before coming out; without those two, any answer is a guess.
Start with a photo
One photo from the back door showing the whole garden almost always saves a trip. Send two if you like: one of the whole and one of the spot where it goes wrong.