A garden is time made visible. In April, at Ringenhof in Lier – the 55-acre estate transformed by Belgian fashion designer Dries van Noten and his partner, Patrick Vangheluwe – a yew hedge throws an arm of green shade over hellebore, fireglow and hosta. Cascades of shell-pink clematis and lilac wisteria tumble over their stays, while between the stuffy hemlocks trusses of pale rhododendrons wilt in the heat. In a sky the colour of Steichen’s delphiniums, two buzzards turn in lazy orbit. A single black tulip is discovered in the long grass. One hour in one afternoon, one day in spring; tomorrow, the garden will have changed again.
For almost 40 years, Dries and Patrick worked in fabricated seasons – four fashion shows a year with collections of lush floral prints and exquisite colour staged variously at the Jardin du Palais Royal, between artist Azuma Makoto’s frozen flower sculptures, and once on a mossy carpet modelled on Millais’s Ophelia. Dries’s references ranged from Baudelaire to David Bowie, capturing a languid elegance with a singular lightness of touch. His vision was meticulous and total. The seasonal labour of a garden is quite different, requiring a fevered faith in what the nature-drunk poet Dylan Thomas called ‘the force that through the green fuse drives the flower’. Will the seeds grow? Will the tomatoes survive a late frost? One of the first things Dries remarks – so common for a gardener – is how dry it is. But what can you do? For the designer, who grew up a Jesuit, horticulture is a constant humbling: ‘At a certain moment as a fashion designer, you think you’re God.’ A garden yanks you feet-first to the ground. ‘It lets you know that it’s not you who decides. You have to live in the time you’re in.’
From an imaginary distance, you might picture Ringenhof as an aesthete’s redoubt, exclusionary as Eden. In reality, it’s more of a republic – of gardeners (five), friends, neighbours and tenant farmers who graze cattle in the west fields. Dries might be spotted gathering flowers, Scott the Airedale at his heels; Patrick a distant figure on his mower. When photographers Viviane Sassen and Elspeth Diederix visited, they were ‘let loose’ to capture the park at all hours of the day and in different seasons. The scale is vast – nine times larger than Great Dixter – its history dating to the Middle Ages. A brewer used it as a country residence in the mid-18th century, after which it was described as having outbuildings, a pleasure garden and water features. In the late 1830s, the son of traders turned Ringenhof into an estate, physician Louis Berckmans (who would later establish a nursery with over 1,000 varieties of pear) overseeing the landscaping. The Neoclassical castle was built at this time, along with a coach house modelled as a Greek temple, a tropical greenhouse, extensions to a half-timbered ‘Swiss cottage’, and an island. The planting consisted mainly of trees – spruce, beech, poplar – until the late 19th century, when the Lowet family bought the park, enlarging the lake, laying out a kitchen garden and dotting the place with follies.
Ringenhof then fell into ruin. When Dries and Patrick first visited in the mid-1990s, it had been unoccupied for 30 years. The garden was fallow, and industry had shouldered right up to its border. Still, there were some good old trees and the bones of two centuries’ worth of horticultural intervention. When the botanist Jelena de Belder-Kovačič, whom Dries had known since childhood, stood on the Palladian portico, she saw the landscape framed by the monumental Doric columns and told Dries and Patrick they’d never find another house with such an outlook.
As a child, Dries was more taken by visions of Bowie and Bryan Ferry on television than the vistas offered by Sunday walks in the countryside. Being made to work in his father’s garden with his siblings was ‘hell’. A neighbouring garden by Russell Page left him unconverted. It must have all sunk in, says Dries, although his latent interest in horticulture only emerged when he and Patrick began visiting the great British gardens – Sissinghurst (WoI July 2023), Rousham (WoI July/Aug 2020), Hidcote – bringing back seeds for their then small plot and balcony in Antwerp. When they had to move out, they wanted to find a place with a bigger garden. And Ringenhof appeared – a delirious, ‘romantic’ prospect. The white Visconti-esque castle was a ‘skeleton’ but a ‘magical place’, says Dries, ‘if you like opera and that sort of thing’. Its restoration would take seven years, never mind the garden.
Before she died, Jelena’s significant contribution to the latter was the cyclamen and rhododendrons, which provide much of the warmer floral palette. Erik Dhont created screens of conifers that shield the park from a factory-lined main road, and sensitively drew out the garden’s original character, adding formal touches such as shaped yew hedges and Italianate cypresses. Piet Oudolf designed feathery borders dismayingly beloved by deer. A mixture of water and tabasco keeps them off, and in general Dries and Patrick are not interventionist. In 2018, roses blighted by black spot were turned into prints for Dries’s autumn/winter 2019 collection.
Patrick’s relationship with the garden tends to the cerebral; he staked out sight lines through the park and plotted how the light might fall. Dries dreamed up the rose garden, filled with a ‘colour system’ comprising 180 different varieties: ‘Zephirine Drouhin’, ‘Baron Girod de l’Ain’, ‘Lavender Pinocchio’ and ‘Red Naomi’ (after Naomi Campbell) contrasted with avens, tamarisk, smoke bush and underplanting of pale-green stachys and mint.
As in the couple’s creative work, threads of history are stitched into the garden’s design, but its impression is very much ‘in time’. Dries has never been one for looking backwards. Still, he feels deeply any damage done to it; when an oak fell, shearing off one side of a monkey puzzle planted when he and Patrick first moved to Ringenhof, he was sick for three days.
There are many old chestnuts about time and gardens healing all manner of wounds. When Dries graduated from fashion school, he told his father he would not be taking over the family business and was promptly cut off. Years later, visiting Ringenhof, his father conceded that perhaps Dries had been right to become a designer. ‘It wasn’t my reputation or the fashion shows that convinced him,’ his son says, only mildly rueful; ‘it was the garden.’
By the time this story is printed, the Ghent azaleas will be in full flower here, the weeping beech draped in viridescence rather than gold. Rainfall is forecast to be 76 millimetres. Dries and Patrick might be busy tending the rose garden or watching for the first sign of medlars. There are fields of possibility. And the work of a garden is never finished.
A version of this article appears in the July 2026 issue of ‘The World of Interiors’. Learn about our subscription offers. Sign up for our bi-weekly newsletter, and be the first to receive exclusive stories like this one, direct to your inbox
