Hortus Botanicus Haren: a garden that thinks in many languages

From a seventeenth-century herb plot to a living mosaic of culture, science, and care

There is a garden on the edge of Groningen that behaves like a mind at work. Paths branch like thoughts. Rooms of planting open and close with a logic that is both precise and generous. The place is Hortus Botanicus Haren, one of the oldest botanical gardens in the Netherlands and among its largest. It covers 14.5 hectares, yet it reads as a series of intimate ideas. You do not conquer it with a single walk. You learn its grammar by returning.

The story begins in 1642, when the pharmacist Henricus Munting laid out a herb garden in the center of Groningen, in what was then Rose Street. That first plot had a practical soul. It was a place where plants were learned by hand and by scent, where names mattered because uses mattered. Over time, the garden moved, grew, and shifted its purpose from medicine to the wider vocabulary of botany. The University of Groningen became its steward. Students studied. Collections expanded. The garden took on the slow confidence that only centuries give.

Today, Haren is maintained with a distinctive form of care. More than 130 volunteers protect and tend its many parts. They weed, plant, stake, label, sweep, and advise. They know where a path floods in heavy rain and which shrub sulks in poor light. They carry the place in their hands and in their voices. This volunteer body is not decoration. It is the instrument through which the garden stays alive. To call that unique is not to flatter. It is to observe that Haren’s structure is civic in the deepest sense.

When we asked Kim Elants from the communications team what, in her view, makes Haren special, she answered without hesitating. “Hortus Botanicus Haren is one of the biggest botanical gardens of Holland and one of the oldest,” before adding what reveals the garden’s character. “It is a volunteer organization. That is also unique.” The scale explains what you see. The volunteers explain how you feel.

A landscape that behaves like a mind

Kim describes the garden’s personality through a creative comparison. “I would describe Hortus Botanicus Haren as a graphic designer with lots of creativity and different positive personality traits.” It is a precise image. A good designer arranges a page so that attention flows. Haren arranges its living pages in the same way. There are about fifteen distinct gardens, each with a tone of its own, each growing in its own time. You move from one to the next and you sense both contrast and conversation. The changes are not abrupt. They are musical. The garden reads as a set of movements within a larger work.

That analogy goes further. Creative work often relies on associative thinking. A shape suggests a countershape. A color proposes its echo. Kim sees the same logic in nature. Plant communities assemble through associations of soil, water, and light. Ideas gather in the same fashion. At Haren, those two patterns overlap until it is difficult to say where one ends and the other begins.

The Ming Garden, stone by stone

No description of Haren is complete without the Chinese Ming Garden, a work that binds geography to friendship. It exists because Groningen and China forged a connection strong enough to be built with stone and water rather than paper and speeches. “There are special banners made in China and shipped to Groningen,” Kim explains. Craftsmen from China traveled to Haren and built the garden stone by stone. The result is both a cultural translation and a place of shelter. Walls structure the view. Doorways frame sky and leaf. Water holds reflections in a vocabulary that belongs to another tradition. Yet in the northern light of Groningen, it feels entirely at home.

Kim calls the Ming Garden unique in Europe and places it within a short, specific list with counterparts in Toronto and Sydney. Whether one approaches this claim as a formal catalogue or as a statement of spirit, the point stands. The Chinese garden in Haren is not a decorative corner. It is a serious act of making, created with the same care that shapes gardens in Suzhou or Hangzhou. It asks visitors to slow down, to stand in doorways, to read stone as if it were text, and to hear water as if it were a line of poetry.

Spring as a way of thinking

Each season rearranges the garden’s sentences. Kim chooses spring as her favorite time. “Everything blooms and you can find lots of different and rare species,” she writes. The numbers tell part of that story. Haren holds about 400 different trees and plants as counted within specific collections, and the wider landscape compounds that diversity. But the reason spring matters is not quantitative. It is the feeling that the garden is thinking out loud. Buds declare their intentions. Lawns soften. Skeletal structures acquire volume. Visitors who come in spring learn the shapes of growth as if leaf and petal were verbs.

The garden’s link to the wider landscape is not ornamental. Two of its areas ground the collection in deep time and place. The Hondsrugtuin sits on the Hondsrug, part of the Hondsrug UNESCO Global Geopark, a ribbon of glacial geology that runs through Drenthe and Groningen. The ecological monument De Laarmantuin stands within the same frame. These gardens are not exhibitions of scattered specimens. They are living chapters from the region’s book of earth and water. The plants here show what the land wants when it is allowed to speak. For a visitor, that language feels both local and universal. This is how the Netherlands holds itself together, one soil type at a time.

A treasury of rooms, not a single stage

Botanical gardens are often described as collections. The word is useful. It captures the responsibility to gather, label, and protect. Yet Haren resists the static side of that term. You do not feel as if you are walking past shelves. You feel as if you are walking through rooms, each with an atmosphere that changes your breath. The Celtic Garden uses water and stone to sketch memory, and in warm weather the air above its pools stitches itself with movement. “A detail that visitors often miss,” Kim notes, “are the dragonflies on the water in the Celtic Garden.” It is a small observation with large consequences. Once you have learned to see dragonflies, you begin to look for them everywhere. Seeing becomes the habit that the garden wishes to teach.

In another corner, orchards shift the cadence of the path. In yet another, woodland plants write their sentences in shade and leaf litter. The pleasure lies in the intervals as much as in the themes. You walk from open to enclosed, from dry to wet, from formality to looseness, and the garden feels larger than its hectares because it asks you to adjust your way of looking again and again.

Heritage with work to do

Haren’s age is a source of authority, but Kim’s answers never hide the fact that botanical gardens must earn their relevance every day. “Botanical gardens today are more than beautiful spaces,” she writes. “They are conservation hubs, research centers, educational platforms, and sustainability exemplars, showing society how humans can live in harmony with nature while protecting biodiversity for the future.” That sentence could sit on a mission statement. In Haren, it lands on the ground. The Ming Garden preserves cultural technique as much as it arranges stones. The Hondsrugtuin preserves a conversation between geology and plant life that is older than any human town. The volunteers preserve a craft of tending that cannot be written down in a manual and cannot be replaced by a budget line.

Education here is not only guided tours or labels. It is the structure of the place. A child who watches dragonflies in the Celtic Garden learns about water quality without a lecture. A student who weeds in the herbaceous borders learns plant families in the hands rather than in a chart. A neighbor who returns every Saturday in April learns the real calendar of spring.

A short history that explains the present

Henricus Munting’s seventeenth-century herb plot began as a practical response to a practical need. Apothecaries did not have the luxury of ignorance. They needed to know which root worked and which leaf healed. The garden’s association with the University of Groningen kept that pragmatic honesty alive even as the focus widened. The future did not erase the past. It taught the past how to keep talking. When you walk Haren today, you can still feel that tone. The labels are careful. The paths serve plants rather than the other way around. The whole composition insists that knowledge and beauty belong on the same page.

This history connects smoothly to the garden’s current social structure. A volunteer organization of more than 130 people does not happen by accident. It happens in a place where institutions treat citizens as colleagues rather than visitors. It happens where locals feel that the garden is theirs to tend. It happens when a garden tells the truth about what it needs, which is not only money or policy, but hands, time, and attention.

The power of a well made analogy

Kim’s comparison between Haren and a graphic designer deserves to be taken seriously. It is more than a decorative metaphor. A graphic designer solves problems of hierarchy, space, and flow. Haren does exactly that, only with living material. A designer decides how a reader moves through a page. Haren decides how a walker moves through light. A designer balances legibility and delight. Haren balances botany and pleasure. To watch the garden at work is to watch a design studio that thinks in chlorophyll.

There is another layer to the analogy. “Everything grows in its own time,” Kim notes. A designer can drag a text box in a second. A gardener has to learn a calendar that cannot be accelerated. This is why botanical gardens carry moral weight in the present day. They show a public what patience looks like. They allow individuals who are starved of time to stand inside a slower intelligence. In a society that often confuses speed with insight, that gift is not trivial.

The promise of spring, the honesty of autumn

Kim’s affection for spring has a counterpart. Spring shows what the garden can become. Autumn shows what it has been willing to be. In Haren, autumn trades brightness for structure. The outlines of the Ming Garden sharpen. The bones of hedges speak more clearly. The Celtic Garden reads in a minor key. Leaves darken the pools. Dragonflies withdraw and memory replaces movement. A botanical garden that is honest about autumn is a garden that respects the full cycle of life. It refuses to be a showroom. It is a teacher.

Winter has its own truth. The tropical houses and sheltered courts offer green concentration when the rest of the country empties its color. Visitors learn that a glasshouse is not a luxury. It is a laboratory for survival where the world’s climates briefly meet. In January, the warm air smells of soil and the quiet is complete. You hear your own footsteps as if they belonged to someone else.

A place to learn how to look

The Hondsrug UNESCO Global Geopark connection gives Haren a geological anchor that not every garden can claim. That anchor is not a trophy. It is a reminder that a garden is only as intelligent as the land beneath it. When Haren teaches visitors to see dragonflies, it is teaching hydrology. When it teaches them to hear the wind in a stand of grasses, it is teaching structure. When it escorts them through a Chinese doorway, it is teaching cultural humility. The volunteers transmit those lessons without sermon. They show rather than tell. They sweep rather than announce. That is why their presence feels like a form of grace rather than a program.

What a botanical garden owes the future

Kim’s line about botanical gardens as “sustainability exemplars” is not a slogan. It is a contract. Haren signs it every time a volunteer lifts a spade, every time a visitor pauses over a plant label, every time a child points at a dragonfly and gives it a name for the first time. The garden’s work in conservation and education reaches beyond fences. It suggests how a city might think, how a university might serve, and how neighbors might share responsibility for a common good.

There are other signatures as well. The Ming Garden signs a contract of friendship and of craft, one that brought banners from China to Groningen and asked skilled builders to place stone upon stone until a different cultural logic could live under Dutch sky. The Hondsrugtuin signs a contract with ice and sand and time. The Celtic Garden signs a contract with myth and water. The orchard signs a contract with appetite and patience. None of these signatures cancel the others. Together, they make a single document that a visitor can read with the eyes and with the body.

A final walk

Toward evening, the light in Haren becomes companionable. The trees hold it like a shared secret. The pathways thin, then gather again, and the many gardens begin to speak across their boundaries. The Ming Garden’s water answers the Celtic pools. The Hondsrugtuin’s ground answers the orchard’s rows. The tropical houses breathe out warmth that lingers in the mind as a promise. You realize, leaving, that the place has taught you a method. Look closely. Accept different languages. Move slowly enough to understand a season.

Kim’s last detail returns, small and exact. “The dragonflies in the Celtic Garden.” Once you know to watch for them, you never visit the same way again. That is what Hortus Botanicus Haren gives a visitor who is willing to pay attention. A change in how seeing works. A change in how time feels. A change in what the word garden can mean when it is built by a city, tended by volunteers, and imagined as a designer imagines a page.

Haren is old. Haren is large. Haren is made of many smaller gardens, each with a personality, a function, and a temper. But none of those facts capture the experience of walking there. The experience is that of standing inside a living intelligence that extends hospitality to anyone who will learn its alphabet. If you accept the invitation, you leave with a different sense of what a public space can do. You also leave with a simple wish to come back, because the garden has taught you that everything here grows in its own time. You will want to keep time with it.

Interview sources: insights and phrases throughout are drawn from written responses shared by Kim Elants, communications coordinator at Hortus Botanicus Haren, including notes on the garden’s history, volunteer structure, the Chinese Ming Garden, the Celtic Garden, seasonal character, biodiversity, and the garden’s social role in conservation and education.

---