Going dutch in yorkshire

The winding back road out of Crayke is not exactly the road to nowhere (it goes to Brandsby) but as a description it is not far off.

This rural corner of the Broad Acres can seem like the land that time forgot and sweeping down the steep hill out of the village, your eyes scan a rolling pastoral scene that an 18th century artist would have relished.

It is all predictably English until you reach the bottom of the hill and a sign that welcomes you into the Dutch House.

It makes an immediate impression and suggests there’s something here worth stopping for. The place has a beguiling and playful air. Is it a garden, an adventure playground, a café, a study centre? An an art gallery maybe?

If you get out of your car you’ll discover the Dutch House defies categories. All around are visual clues that point to witty minds at work.

Any York visitor here who knows the city’s Museum Gardens might also find that there is a style, a singular way of approaching nature, that rings a bell.

The Dutch House is the home of Sjaak (Jack) Kastelijn and Cecily Creemers and their young son. The pair come from Sittard near Maastricht in the Limburg province at the southern end of Holland and they like to point out it’s the only part of their homeland that isn’t flat.

Sjaak, who worked in horticulture and Cecily, a graphic designer, came over here for a camping holiday in 2006.

It was a trip with a purpose. They had arranged their itinerary around a set of gardens where they planned to speak to ten head gardeners.

What did they tell the couple? “That it was hard work and bad pay,” says Sjaak with a smile. But he was brought up on a farm and knew that already. What he was really after on this trip was to discover the gardeners’ philosophy and approach to their work.

Significantly the couple’s tour took in Great Dixter in East Sussex. This was the family home of the late Christopher Lloyd, the author, among many other things, of a lovely book called The Well-Tempered Garden where he sets out his ideas for gardens which are experimental, exciting and constantly changing.

Lloyd writes in the book,“Never let your garden be stereotyped and never take a plant or group of plants for granted... with annuals it is a crime to grow the same kinds in the same part of the garden year after year.”

And by the look of things, this is exactly what Sjaak has taken to heart.

Their fact-finding holiday brought them eventually to York. Here Sjaak and Cecily forsook their tent for one night and booked bed and breakfast accommodation.

On the way back home to Holland the couple discussed their experiences and decided on something that had been in their minds for some time. England was where they would go to live.

Sjaak wrote off for jobs and landed one almost immediately as head gardener at the Museum Gardens in York.

Cecily found she was pregnant. It was soon settled that they would call their son after the city where he was conceived on their one night in the bed and breakfast.

They arrived to live in Hovingham in November 2008. Sjaak began his daily commute to York and Cecily started work in a café.

“It was all a bit vague,” she says. “ We didn’t have a plan apart from an idea that we wanted to run our own thing. I was thinking of setting up a graphic design company. I’ve done that kind of work for a long time.

“Then we saw these premises. The last farmer here, Harry Hall, died in 2003. It had been a café and the people here wanted a farm shop, but were denied planning permission. We had lots of talks with the council to make 99 per cent sure we’d get a yes. A lot of the locals were a bit reluctant.”

Sjaak and family moved to what they re-named the Dutch House in March 2010, leasing it from the Crayke Estate.

“I’m interested in art, Sjaak in gardening,” says Cecily. “We wanted to show how artistic nature can be. There’s a strong connection between the two.

“We wanted a very child-friendly place where artists could exhibit and also where people came not just to view but to workshops and have a go themselves.

“That’s what was in the back of our heads. We thought we could realise our wish list in a year. But that’s not realistic. Sjaak is working full time, I’m running this. It’s one step at a time.”

Cecily does the cooking in the restaurant on Sundays, although they have a full-time cook for the rest of the time.

One of the options is a children’s art birthday party with poffertjes – little pancakes.

They are going big on this Dutch treat. Some 40 kinds of pancakes, pannekoeken, are available back home. Here they have ten including savoury things like brie with roasted vegetables.

As we sit at one of their tables, a departing diner breaks into the conversation. “It’s my birthday today, thank you we’ve had a lovely lunch.”

Outside are 1.6 acres with the Foss running through it. It’s not the sluggish debris-strewn waterway familiar in York where it joins the River Ouse, but a tinkling silver beck.

Sjaak has built a maze and there are willow constructions and sculptures. “We have been more focused to get the café up and running, the next thing is to move the garden forward. It’s a five-year process,” he says.

“There’s a market for things that are different, that don’t fit into any category. A garden that’s nice is not enough, it needs to be distinct from the rest.

“But starting a business in a recession, it’s a challenge.”

It’s a tranquil and intriguing garden. “I did it in my spare time, I’m not sure how it evolved. I don’t want an ordered playground, it’s not an educational centre, it’s about fun. The setting of the garden doesn’t have to be neat and tidy and clean.

“Kids like to explore and look at things from a different perspective. I will deliberately leave part of it to go wild.”

This sounds like the voice that guides the hand at the Museum Gardens in York.

Any visitor here will see that the organising principle is a quirky one which expands ideas about what can be done with a public open space.

For example, previously anonymous stone sarcophagi from Roman times have been upended near the gardens’ city entrance and stand like surreal sentry boxes in a flower bed.

A tree trunk beside a path has been planted upside down. Small bits of stone ruins are laid on the grass in formations that catch the eye.

Why? “I like to combine things in ways that are not obvious, says Sjaak.

“Taking things out of their context, that’s what I like to do. I don’t want to push things too far – I wouldn’t put a rowing boat in there – you have to keep in stylish and it has to be done with a certain amount of flair so people look at things anew.”

There’s no arguing with that. The sarcophagi had lain overlooked and neglected for years on the other side of a corner of the old Roman fortress known as the Multangular Tower which takes up a corner of the gardens.

“Some said it was blasphemy, not respectful,” says Sjaak. “Maybe it helps that I’m not brought up here. Clearly they are coffins and it looks like a bulldozer has run through a graveyard. It’s to draw attention to them.”

His ten-acre place of work requires a delicate balancing act. In the late 1820s the Yorkshire Philosophical Society bought three acres adjoining St Mary’s Abbey where they built the Tempest Anderson Hall, now the Yorkshire Museum, to house their antiquarian collections.

The society extended their land holdings down to the river and landscape architect Sir John Murray Naysmith designed the gardens to show off the plants the society’s members were bringing back from distant shores.

The botanical garden with glasshouses and fountains was for the exclusive use of the wealthy members of the society.

Post-war it was handed over to the city council and the collection degraded. The Museum Gardens had to adjust to public needs and it became a place where on Saturdays lads might come for a kickabout.

That is now banned along with other things like drinking alcohol. Plus there’s more cash to enhance the botanical aspect.

But it all has to be achieved without curbing public pleasures and that includes making it available for the tread of thousands who turned up for a recent recording of the Antiques Roadshow.

A detailed history of the society was published in recent times, but according to Sjaak, “there’s hardly any information about the gardens themselves.”

What he’s up to now is all inspired by natural planting and the “Dutch Wave” which means grasses, bulbs, other perennials, lavender beds. “I’m attracted to that kind of planting, taking shrubs out, leaving trees in.”

The big new project concerns the tiny, historic observatory where he’s going to build a miniature solar system in the flower beds. There will be a York limestone stairway and all the planting will be themed, black and white, and night-scented.

There’s just one aspect of his adopted city he still needs to come to term with. “There are hardly any tulips. But they are lovely and fantastic to work with. In the whole of Yorkshire you see daffodils, daffodils. They are beautiful but they are everywhere.”