In the summer of 2008 the inaugural edition of the International Garden and Landscape Architecture Triennial is being staged in Apeldoorn, the garden city of the Netherlands. This city, this landscape of gardens, aims to raise its profile with a fitting large-scale event that is supra-regional, an activity of international significance: a manifestation about nature, culture and landscape, the three components that traditionally form the heart of landscape and garden architecture.

The highlight of the 100-day Garden and Landscape Architecture Triennial in Apeldoorn is 'The Royal Mile', a border with a total length of 1609 m, designed by 10 of the leading border designers in Europe: Wilko Karmelk and Helen Lewis, Fleur van Zonneveld, Jacqueline van der Kloet (the Netherlands); Christine Orel, Christian Meyer, Ursula Gräfen (Germany); Jane Schul (Denmark); Julie Toll, Christopher Bradley-Hole (United Kingdom) and Anita Fischer (Germany), and Eric Ossart and Arnaud Maurières (France).

The Discovery of the Netherlands is about the aesthetic 'reclamation' of the Netherlands in the art of painting. The flat countryside with its rivers, marshy farmland alternating with tracts of woodland, and the ever-changing Dutch skies above have been transformed into art. Framing nature unlocks it for aesthetic appreciation. There is no other country in the world where artists were so early to render their own surroundings as a beautiful idyll.

Around the world, the notion of 'the Dutch landscape' still evokes an image that is strongly influenced by the painterly tradition of unspoilt and idyllic farmland. However, like many other countries, the Netherlands has altered radically over the last century. Agriculture is being supplanted by suburbs, infrastructure for the sake of mobility, and recreation. Since the 1980s, a number of outstanding landscape photographers and video artists have been taking this artificial character of the Dutch landscape and nature as their creative point of departure.

This publication is about the significance of garden and landscape architecture as a design discipline. The core of the book and exhibition is formed by a selection of 40 original designs and sketches from the European tradition of garden and landscape architecture. They were designed by familiar names such as Le Nôtre, Humphrey Repton, Peter Joseph Lenné and Bernard Tschumi, but also by less famous designers.

Over the last three decades, Michael van Gessel (b. 1948) has amply demonstrated his exceptional talent as a landscape architect. His work is highly varied in nature and embraces a diversity of typologies, ranging from private gardens to urban planning projects.

The cultural landscape is the garden of the House of Europe. It is a binding force in a society that is increasingly global and moves ever faster, the counterpoise of progress. The cultural landscape is rapidly gaining in popularity, because society's metropolitanization, modernization and increasing mobility require a backdrop and a substratum - a context. In the cultural landscape, the reciprocal adaptation of nature and culture is rendered concrete and specific, so that you can visit, experience and admire it.