Two Parks, One Weekend
Is Urban Nature Enough?
Perhaps from the moment that early human beings started constructing longer-term dwellings, roughly 12,000 years ago, our collective, evolving culture began to differentiate between nature and not-nature in describing our environment. My own idea of “nature” arises in relation to varying feelings and concepts about the “built environment” —the environment shaped by humans into dwellings, streets, and other technology that give form to collective living, and spaces (outdoor and in) constructed by humans from the “materials” of nature such as parks, gardens, and farmland. Answering the question “what is nature” conjures an image of a tree, an uninhabited wilderness, the savanna, a mountain — whatever “outdoor” or planetary phenomena dominates our (early) experiences of the region of our dwelling. But then looking outside the windows over the streets of Utrecht I see numerous trees, patches of grass, narrow garden beds dug into the sidewalk by the fronts of rowhouses. What for some is also “nature,” and what is marketed as nature by garden centers and city planners — but for me is something else…how do I frame this?
Following the Driebergen walk that began this series of “wandels” in the Netherlands’ natural environment, I had surgery on my right hand, which would restrict my range for a few weeks — so the weekend prior to the surgery, in-between finishing off projects and cooking meals for the freezer, I took my last rides on the bike for a while and visited two of the larger parks on the outer edges of Utrecht’s urban sphere. I was curious what I would feel in these blended spaces where nature and urban environments meet. While not exactly wild, I was thinking about how accessible green spaces are so important, more important perhaps than wild ones, in the lives of people living in dense areas. Would I find something nurturing, and if so, what exactly would that mean?
Saturday, Máxima Park.
The sun appears after a rainy autumn morning and finds me lost in a computer screen. I wrench myself away and head west on my bike over the Amsterdam-Rijn Kanaal to the Groendijk. It’s a familiar route, gliding under old pollarded willows and past the century-old houses of De Meern. I’m looking for a place to sit under some trees and ventilate my busy mind, maybe do some qi gong practice, if it is quiet enough. After sitting for hours in front of the computer screen, I long to receive some energy from the elements.
Past an area of soccer fields and sport facilities on Parkzichtlaan, I reach an entrance to the middle of Máxima Park, gliding between high honeycomb “walls” — a four-meter high cast cement lattice that borders this part of the park, partly enveloped by the leaves of climbers. Next to an arching bridge over a long pond I lock the bike to a stall, golden beech leaves murmuring above me in the autumn breeze. I begin walking along the paved path toward the end of the water. A moment later I step onto the grass. I didn’t come here to walk on pavement.
Máxima Park, named for the current queen and officially opened in 2013, is at the heart of the newest area in the city of Utrecht, Leidsche Rijn — named after a remaining part of the Rhine river that flows through it on the way to the city of Leiden and the sea. The area has been under development for 20 years and encompasses the old villages of De Meern, Vleuten and unincorporated areas in-between. In the center is an archeological museum, Hoge Woerd, located within the reconstruction of an old Roman Castellum, and near where a Roman ship (ca. 85–200 C.E.) was found in the basin of the old river — now the centerpiece of the exhibition space. The park spreads from here in a vaguely fish-shaped form northwest, surrounding the one-street hamlet of Alendorp and its century-old houses, crossing under the Vleutensbaan roadway and ending just before the Harrijnseplas, a recreation area with a large lake. The park was designed by landscape architect Adriaan Greuze in 1997 after winning a proposal call and officially opened, by Queen Máxima and King Willem-Alexander, in 2013.* As a large green space in contact with a developing urban area, it has the feel of something meticulously designed to incorporate the desires of multiple stakeholders, with clearly-defined areas for recreation and sport, for climbing children, for thirsty and hungry strollers, and garden lovers, with an emphasis on open sky, space, and accessibility. Its café building, light gray with fairy-tale white gingerbread trim, houses various event spaces for weddings and meetings. Its sprawling terrace faces a reconstructed curving Rhine, here called “Vikingsrijn,” where you can rent large swan-headed pedalboats in warmer months to cruise around in. The main sport area near the Castellum has a small stadium and several open greens. There are various gardens and areas planted with trees, walkways and bicycle paths lovingly paved for the ease of strollers and other wheeled devices, and on a sunny Saturday in November well-trod.
The section of park where I stand has large swaths of young beeches barely 3 meters high, planted in evenly spaced rows. It is more reminiscent of a tree farm than a bosquet, so the intention of this layout is unclear. There are large swaths of such plantings in this area — just beeches and grass. This seeming monocultural preference doesn’t reconcile with the frequent discussions in the media here on improving biodiversity in nature or gardens here, nor ecological gardening principles followed by professionals.
Across the water I notice a grove of something else and make my way to it. On the other side of the bridge is a grove of full-size trees in the cypress family. The red leaves’ fringed appearance reminds me of Japanese maples. They’ve begun to carpet the ground with their crimson.
This grove occupies a small area, sitting between a thicker wood and the long pond. The ground under them is carved by rivulets off the pond into marshy islands forming an attractive place to sit and look out over the water. There were gaps in tall grasses along the water‘s edge where I could see the bridge, sky and various gulls scooting about on the surface, and it was relatively peaceful. Sitting under a tree eating an apple, I gazed at the water and debated whether to linger in this spot. Pairs and families with strollers passed over the bridge, and there was a young couple playfully taking photographs of each other 10 meters from me. My gaze, instead of turning inward, turned to the memory of the famous painting by Seurat, “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” where the sunlit water and green banks of the Seine are support for a crowd of 19c. Parisians escaping their own city. I felt out in public, but not anonymously invisible. Unable to settle into the contours of my mind, nor simply enjoy the liveliness of my surroundings.,I set out to explore other areas.
There were signs for a Japanese garden; hoping to see something distinctive I followed them. It was a fair distance to reach the entrance on the other side of the Vikingsrijn, hiding behind a perfectly even berm of rhododendron.
To get there, I was still walking in the grass, zigzagging through more grids of young beeches, their newness naked under a now steel sky. I paused by the side of the new old river, with neatly trimmed grass. I entered the garden by passing between two berms, whose raised grassy earth, covered with rhododendron, create an enclosed feeling. In my life in America’s northeast, I had visited many traditional Japanese gardens and enjoyed their quality of unfolding vistas and the sculptural deployment of trees and plants that create a landscape within a landscape. Here, the rhododendrons rode gently in large even masses along either side of a winding path, flanked on one side with a spare, curved pond featuring a few large, smooth stones — rarities in the lowlands. A section carved out of the rhododendron on one side was planted with Japanese pines — four, in a row — and some azaleas - for variety? These were all dormant, waiting for March, so the overall feeling was of an unfinished painting with just the foundations laid out. Further in were grassy pockets tucked between the path and the rhododendron berm hiding the waterway on the other side. In one I unexpectedly came upon two rabbits, munching on the grass. One seemed older, with speckled fur and very chill about my presence. The other, a younger brown one, skittered away at first but returned to finish his meal. I watched them for a while, kneeling on the ground. This was my wildlife interaction for the day, and moment of stillness. All three of us had dropped out of the sky into this neatly manicured armpit of grass it seemed, but there was no looking-glass to be found.
The sun behind a shelf of cloud and a cold wind encouraged me to return home. Other parts of the park hinted at by signs, such as the Vlindertuin (Butterfly garden) would have to come another time.
After struggling with how to write about my experience in Máxima Park, I acknowledge I haven’t given myself much time to explore it. The park website offers a lot of information and an interactive map. Studying the map you see more than a dozen different features highlighted, each of a different sort, to the point that you might think, if you had not visited, that Máxima Park resembles more of a theme park than green space. It is somewhere in-between.
Whereas in America, the built environments, sprawling through they might, are still in large part surrounded by landscapes dominated by other species and their worlds, here the opposite is true. In the Netherlands, the density of people and their cultivated space is such that the wilder places are but the garnish upon the plate of the continent. The primary function of parks here in general, and Máxima Park specifically, is not to be a stand-in or reconstitution of “nature”— but to integrate through nature’s “beneficial materials” parts of the built environment with each other. As with so many areas of Utrecht, the parks and green areas are a socially binding factor masquerading as gateways to true open space, but not actually providing them. Perhaps like the nodes along the invisible meridians of the body**, parks and green spaces play a role in regulating the energy of development and social occupation. It has a seamless quality, where the green space is not distinct from the surroundings but interwoven and interdependent with it. It partly explains why Dutch cities are so much greener in feeling than older American cities, which with pioneer’s attitude were built to counter the wildnerness around them. In an area like Leidsche Rijn with so much new construction and development, the feeling of its park is more artificial — were there older specimens of tree, knocked away for the new? Or places where the riverbanks were full of natural plants and “weeds” that are now grass? But this deployment and editing of nature’s material is not necessarily negative, any more than a beaver’s dam. My experience of Utrecht generally is that the green spaces — Griftpark, Kromme Rijn, Biltsegrift & Zilveren Schaats, Oog in Al and the Merwede’s Kanaalweg and Keulsekade; the greenway along the Vecht to Slot Zuilen, Julianapark, even the hofs and old monastic medicinal gardens of the old medieval center, and the meandering greens along its Singel, help each neighborhood maintain its integrity, each with its own unique qualities and feeling, while being part of a collective whole. This is a feeling that denser cities like New York, for all its parks, lacks. As a cyclist moving around and through the neighborhoods of Utrecht from any direction to any other, I experience continual moments of sweetness in how the fabric of each neighborhood fits like a singular piece in a quilt, stitched together with green — richly urban, but not as a counter to nature, but as an uneasy hybrid with it.
Sunday: Fort Rijnauwen & Amelisweerd Estate.
Another day starting with rain. I finish cooking the last dishes for my upcoming one-handed days: ratatouille, lentil soup, roasted root vegetables, rice, potatoes, salmon, chicken thighs, quinoa with feta, cassoulet. I work on these early, because the sun is coming out in the afternoon, according to the Dutch weather app “shower radar.” I finish around two and bike eastward in low, full sun. It feels fantastic to be out in the golden light. Crossing the city center I pass through Wilhelmina Park — a mature, elegant park suited to its wealthier surroundings with a curving pond and many large trees bedecked in fall colors. I thread myself between the old Tolhuys and the Kromme Rijn (“Curvy Rhine”) to the backside of the Uithof (a/k/a Utrecht Science Park), facing Fort Rijnauwen.
I first found this route when I did reconaissance for a Walking Meditation Workshop I led for students at Utrecht University during its first-ever “wellness week” this past spring. The Uithof is a modern campus first designed in the 1960’s, and gradually adds a new building here and there to this day. It holds major divisions of the University, the Hogeschool Utrecht (a university of Applied Sciences) a university medical campus, and several independent science and technology research institutes. Both mid-modern and contemporary buildings rise around a cluster of roads named for major universities of the world, surrounded by pastures of grazing sheep. On a map the areas of Amelisweerd and Fort Rijnauwen are clearly just next to the modern campus, but because I’d always approached them from their other side, in my mind they had been two distinct places, totally unconnected as destinations.
Setting off from a “back corner” of the airy, open campus, under the allée along Zandlaan, I ride a straight 1.2km shot across green pastures in the direction of the small town of Bunnik, which lies just east of Utrecht. In this place one can imagine for a moment a time a century ago when asphalt roads for buses and cars didn’t exist. It’s one of the magical influences of bicycling on the infrastructure here that has always impressed me: there are many areas where as a bicyclist (or walker) you move through spaces between built-up areas absent the presence of motorized vehicles. The resulting quiet is key to the experience. These pasture-lands between de Bilt, the Uithof, Zeist and Bunnik are car-free havens for bicyclists, walkers, and sheep.
I leave my bike locked by a tree on the edge of the Hoge bos, a triangle of forested area next to the large, overgrown fort from Utrecht’s part of the country’s old water defense system, and then walk on the narrowest paths into the middle of the wood — whatever side trail looks least used, I take. Being Sunday and sunny there are many people out. I run into someone I know. But this is quite a different walk from the previous day. The atmosphere of this small wood, compared to the monocultures of Máxima, is of a portal whose old origin is not fully diminished by the control exercised upon it. It is comparatively wild: unlike the tightly curated Máxima, the trees have a dense and lively mix of undergrowth and deadwood, and there’s a mixture of different species, though nothing very unusual. Older beeches tower with their smooth skins in rows along the paths, the eyes that remain from being limbed-up staring silently. Oaks and a handful of birch, ash, chestnut, and hawthorn mingle throughout. I had the idea to find a place where the sun would be on my face, but there are no hills or knolls to lend exposure — and in the end it was also cold, so I decided to walk paths I didn’t know. At one corner on the Bunnik side of the Fort, five different paths come together to connect various places — there is a wayfinding post with direction indicators for Houten, Bunnik, Utrecht, Zeist, and Fort Vechten. Though busy with couples and families in every direction, I felt again the sense of being in another time where the horse and carriage would not have been out of place. Indeed, the area of Rijnauwen and Amelisweerd are heritage land estates, or landgoed[2], that have been in place for 200 years or more. Sights of the (former) homes of nobility, they often have many hectares of land shaped for another sort of pleasure and preserved from extensive agricultural use. Their forms — geometrically shaped forests with wide and narrow paths; allées connecting vistas, suggesting movement across domains; designated areas for animals, for orchards, parterres and enclosures for herbs or flowers — are similar here to their formal cousins in France and England, sharing a long history that reaches not only into the past of the Netherlands, but of Europe overall since the Renaissance and before. To speak of this as nature is to deploy the word, ‘nature’, as an 18c. lord might — a dance where human effort is helping nature to show her best face. It is a version where nature is an artist’s material, rather than an ancestor, host, or fellow traveler. To walk in such gardens and forests is illuminating and gives pleasure. It is not a place to experience the symphonic power of primordial, wild environments is prominent. This I recognize as my dilemma, the one which inspired this series. Where to be apart from the hand of human ingenuity?
I walked south from the fort on a long allée lined with old beech and oak, lit from the side by the sinking sunlight, leading to the 18c. Oud Amelisweerd estate house, now a museum, and to de Veld Keuken, a farm-to-table restaurant in the old coachhouse next door. This sits at the southern edge of the landgoed***, where I’ve come many times by bike. It’s a lovely, lively place on the meandering Kromme Rijn, in a spot where the river has flowed since Roman times. Naturally it was quite busy, but I took a hot chocolate on the terrace at one of the shared tables and gazed out over the landgoed, pretending this was what I sought. I returned to my bike with the sun on my shoulder sinking through the low horizon of trees. An accessible place where it is so pleasant to walk with feet on dirt and sand, surrounded by some horticultural diversity and history, is a balm even if it isn’t remote and wild. Is that enough?
At the most basic level, why leave home at all or spend time outside? Especially if you have a garden, like your house, and relish time alone? There is much about our history as a species of natural surroundings that ends itself to how we form socially coherent and compassionate groups. One gateway to this is reading Ming Kuo, a researcher in psychology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, who has published several papers from years of controlled studies on the impact of green spaces in urban environments — and natural spaces overall, that suggests we need to see them as more than “amenities” or places to protect essential species, but also as having an essential interactive role for human and social health. Her research implicates the presence or absence of parks and nature in our surroundings in shaping how people behave towards each other in neighborhoods, criminality, psychological stability and physiological health. The impacts of green spaces are eye-opening — a brief couple: Blighted urban neighborhoods where abandoned lots were converted to parks and gardens saw a 9% drop in their crime rates. A stay in a forest for three days increases the number of the immune system’s natural killer cells 50% — and is still significantly heightened above pre-forest-walk levels a month later. The story of Kuo’s research and her own surprise at the significance of the results came to me through the podcast Hidden Brain last year — the episode called “Our Better Nature.”
Wandering in a park or a landgoed, knowing its role is not to provide an experience of an immune-boosting forest symphony— but to provide culturally-essential open space, my critical eye is tempered. Parks such as Máxima and the estate grounds of Amelisweerd are curated experiences that will not offer the same possibilities as a walk in places left wild, but they still feel necessary to me as part of the fabric of where I live, and what makes it liveable.
My reference points for parks also suggest bias to my analysis — growing up in southeast Pennsylvania, parks on the edges or outside of cities tend to be preserved nature around exceptionally special features of the landscape such as natural rivers and waterfalls, and elevated landforms. For example, Wissahickon Park in Philadelphia, straddling the creek of the same name, descends through a 30-meter gorge along the western flank of the city from several springs to the north. This area was frequented in the early 19c. by spiritual practitioners attracted to the remarkable natural beauty and energy of the place. The waterway began to develop into an industrial resource with mills along its length as the century progressed. The city noted this and realized it was going to lose a valuable source of drinking water. It moved to preserve the watershed and also provide a space of light and air for citizens living in the pollution of the industrial-age town, one of those cities built as refuge from the wilderness. Today the five square kilometer Wissahickon Park is semi-wild, forested and crossed with narrow trails for hiker, horse, and mountain biker — leaving room for solitude and the inherent energy of the pre-human landscape to appear. I also lived for many years near Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmstead’s 19c. Central Park, which was pioneering in creating a 3.4 square kilometer English landscape garden-style park and incorporating “recreational areas” seamlessly within broad areas of naturalized forest and rocky outcrops. These “wilder” areas of Central Park are host to hundreds of species and transport one away from the feeling of urban life.
But even in these cases, the hand of human ingenuity and intention is there to create a green space for the enjoyment and edification of humans — a public garden expanded into extraordinary proportions, in a land where there is so much room for such things****. They are a space of remove from the influence of concrete, stone, asphalt and motors, from the density of living in close proximity to many strangers, an “antidote” to the end of the pastoral age brought by the rise of industrialization.
In a nearly new city park such as Máxima there is a superficial remove from stone and concrete, but the curated feel highlights its urban dependence. Rijnauwen and Amelisweerd, having pre-industrial origins open small windows to a past world, but merely whet the appetite for a world where the human’s adventure in her own development is humbled a bit by the greater achievement of the ancestors — trees, rocks, water and sky — that she is descended from.
* Recalling the world of 1997, so far removed from the environment and social concerns of today, I wonder how many points of reference embedded in the winning proposal are still relevant.
** Meridians are energetic pathways in the body that are accessed through acupuncture and other Traditional Chinese Medicine practices.
*** A landgoed is an estate in the Netherlands and the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium, often serving as a public garden or green space. They can be several hundred hectares.
**** Some ‘wow’ figures: The size of the Netherlands landmass is 33,700 square kilometers, with 18 million people, for a density of 534ppl/sqkm. The size of the state of Pennsylvania’s landmass in the northeastern US is 116,000sqkm or 3.5x larger than the country of the Netherlands, and has 12.8 million people, a mere 110ppl/sqkm. Source: Wikipedia.
