Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland's Glory

by Lisa Jardine

  There are, nevertheless, significant differences in emphasis between the Dutch tradition and developing garden styles in England. It is striking how much attention is paid, both in Dutch garden poems and in gardening handbooks, to trees and shrubs as the most significant and admired features of any well-planned garden, taking precedence over gorgeous displays of flowers in ingeniously intricate arrangements of beds, or even exotic fruits and unfamiliar vegetables. Avenues of elms or limes (fast-growing, and producing a desirably strong, erect tree, with the foliage high and spreading) were pronounced by visitors to be the glory of many a European garden, and particularly of Dutch ones. André Mollet – gardener to Charles I and Charles II in England, Frederik Hendrik in Holland, and Queen Christina of Sweden – makes it a first requirement of any royal garden that the associated house ‘be situated in an advantageous location, so that it can be adorned with all those things necessary for its beautification’, of which the foremost is

  a grand double or triple avenue of trees, either elms, or limes (which are the two types of tree we consider suitable for this purpose), which avenue should be aligned at right angles to the front of the house, with a large semi-circle [bordered by trees] where it begins.

  In the 1651 edition of Mollet’s little book The Pleasure Garden, based on his most recent designs, for the gardens of the Queen of Sweden in Stockholm, there is a single chapter on ‘the flower garden’. In it, Mollet proclaims tulips ‘greatly to surpass even anemones in beauty and rarity, by reason of their being so admirably variegated and multi-coloured, in an infinity of colour-combinations – white, purple and blue, deep red and white, red and yellow, and many other diverse colours, up to five or six on the same flower – which makes them esteemed by the discerning above all other flowers’.26 The rest of the book consists of discussions of trees and shrubs, including exotica like orange trees, lemon trees, myrtles and jasmines, which Mollet considers a worthy challenge for the skilled gardener to endeavour to grow successfully in cold northern climates.

  Here is another reminder of the ease of to-and-fro flow of artistic talent and creativity, backwards and forwards across national boundaries, in this case in the field of garden design. André Mollet, whose father had been a royal gardener in France, first came to England in the 1620s, possibly as a member of Henrietta Maria’s household. From there he went to the United Provinces, on the recommendation of Charles I (and most likely Constantijn Huygens), where he was responsible for garden designs at several royal palaces for Frederik Hendrik and Amalia van Solms as part of their selfconscious efforts to match other European royal houses in their ostentatious style of living. After five years designing gardens for the Queen of Sweden (another aspiring style-setter among European heads of state), he returned to London in 1660, and took on an ambitious remodelling of the gardens at St James’s Palace for Charles II.27

  Garden historians have expended a good deal of energy in struggling to define the characteristically ‘French’, ‘English’ and ‘Dutch’ garden as it emerges in this period. In fact, decisions about what and how to emulate are in the hands of gardeners who shuttle between the great houses of various nations, and who adapt to the demands and tastes of their employers. By the time Mollet arrived back in England in 1660, Charles II expected a rectilinear expanse of water, or ‘canal’ (a channel, as opposed to a pond or fountain), as a focal point of any garden of modern design, thereby emulating the Dutch. Garden taste required it; Charles’s peregrinations around northern Europe during his exile had tutored his eye to Dutch garden fashion. At the same time, we might argue that his endorsement of the Dutch style committed him to a version of gardening that pitted the enthusiast against an uncooperative nature and inhospitable surroundings (particularly the encroachment of water). The Dutch garden mentality, in other words, seeped into the English consciousness, shaping an English ideal of landscape beauty compatible with a Dutch one.

  So, under Mollet’s new English designs, St James’s Palace and Hampton Court both got ornamental canals, where their Dutch counterparts had functional boundary drainage ditches, and raised walks and flowerbeds corresponding to the functional Dutch dykes. Trees are also used to give a highly visible geometry to both gardens, just as they had been used to line dykes and ditches at Honselaarsdijk. Nor was the flat, lowlying terrain at St James’s a drawback, since in this respect it resembled a Dutch landscape. The canal Mollet introduced provided drainage for the boggy ground, exactly as in the gardens around The Hague.

  Constantijn Huygens’s correspondence reveals that while Frederik Hendrik employed André Mollet to design the ornamental beds and flower gardens at Honselaarsdijk in the 1630s, the Stadholder personally undertook the planting of trees himself – or rather, he assigned the tree-planting to a senior court official directly answerable to him.28 Trees were the essential framework for a Dutch garden, stabilising the soil and at the same time, by marking corners and edges of dykes and canals, giving visual meaning to its necessary network of drainage channels.

  The emphasis on trees as defining features in a Dutch garden lasted throughout the century. In the 1690s, a visitor to Hans Willem Bentinck’s country estate (Jacob Cat’s old estate), located between The Hague and Scheveningen, wrote of it:

  The Gardens consist of Many fine Rows of Sycamores, Ewes [Yews] and other Trees cut very handsomely … very fine Ewe Trees and Hedges, with fine Orange and Bay Trees &ca finely sett out.29

  Tree-lined walks bordering canals and framing avenue approaches also featured prominently in the landscaping of Dutch towns. Visitors to the Northern Provinces regularly commented on the way that Dutch towns resembled gardens – in the 1640s, John Evelyn found them ‘frequently planted and shaded with beautiful lime trees, which are set in rows before every man’s house’, and exclaimed: ‘Is there a more ravishing, or delightful object then to behold some intire streets, and whole Towns planted with these Trees, in even lines before their doors, so as they seem like Cities in a wood?’ Twenty years later in England, shortly after the Restoration, it was precisely such shady avenues of lime trees which met with Evelyn’s admiration at Charles II’s newly renovated and refurbished palace at Hampton Court, where he described the park as ‘formerly a flat, naked piece of Ground, now planted with sweete rows of lime-trees, and the Canale for water now neere perfected’.

  Another seventeenth-century visitor reported that the streets of Leiden were ‘so many Alleys of a well-adorn’d garden’, while yet another was so struck by the numbers of trees that he was quite ready to believe that people might ask ‘whether Leyden was in a wood, or a wood in Leyden’.30 One of Constantijn Huygens’s public projects, of which he was immensely proud, was the design and execution of a paved road linking The Hague directly to the town’s port at Scheveningen – ‘our illustrious new way digged and paved through the sanddownes from hence to Schevering’, as he described it in a letter to Utricia Swann.31 An engraving of this project shows it too to have been bordered on either side with double avenues of trees for the whole of its length.

  Expenditure on trees was a sensible long-term option – a way of making an investment with good prospects for future growth in value. As John Evelyn explains in his popular book on tree cultivation, Sylva, printed in London ten years after Huygens published his poem in praise of Hofwijk, when there was an acute timber shortage in England following the depletion of forests and gardens during the Civil Wars, the gracious avenues and groves of trees on a country estate were ‘dulce et utile’ (pleasant and useful). Trees planted ornamentally could eventually serve ‘for Timber and Fuel, as well as for shade and ornament to our dwellings’.32

  Or they could be sold on to provide avenue trees for another man’s ambitious garden plan. Evelyn describes the transplanting of full-grown oaks in this way, with considerable verve and brio:

  Chuse a Tree as big as your thigh, remove the earth from about him; cut through all the collateral Roots, till with a competent strength you can enforce him down upon one side, so as to come w
ith your Axe at the taproot; cut that off, redress your Tree, and so let it stand cover’d about with the mould you loosen’d from it, till the next year, or longer if you think good; then take it up at a fit season; it will likely have drawn new tender Roots apt to take, and sufficient for the Tree, wheresoever you shall transplant him.

  […] A little before the hardest Frosts surprize you, make a square Trench about your Tree, at such distance from the Stem as you judge sufficient for the Root; dig this of competent depth, so as almost quite to undermine it; by placing blocks, and quarters of wood, to sustain the Earth; this done, cast in as much Water as may fill the Trench, or at least sufficiently wet it, unless the ground were very moist before. Thus let it stand, till some very hard Frost do bind it firmly to the Roots, and then convey it to the pit prepar’d for its new station; but in case the mould about it be so ponderous as not to be remov’d by an ordinary force; you may then raise it with a Crane or Pully hanging between a Triangle, which is made of three strong and tall Limbs united at the top, where a Pully is fastned, as the Cables are to be under the quarters which bear the earth about the Roots.33

  In 1662 Sir Constantijn Huygens’s son Christiaan wrote to the newly established Royal Society in London, requesting a pre-publication copy of Evelyn’s Sylva for his father.34 By this time some of those precious saplings, lovingly planted in the 1630s, would have needed to be moved, to preserve the symmetry and perfect matching of trees which was an essential part of the garden’s original conception.

  In ‘Hofwijk’, Constantijn Huygens urges his children and grandchildren to refrain from felling the trees that were his pride and joy, but still he refers to them as ‘invested gold’ and ‘planted capital’. Felling and transplantation were recognised advantages of extensive wooded estates – substantial trees might be dug up (with a large clod of earth attached) and moved to furnish more avenues, while trees thinned to keep coppices airy and suitable to walk in could be sold for commercial use.

  I close this exploration of Constantijn Huygens’s beloved Hofwijk with a charming letter, written by the ageing diplomat to his friend Sir William Temple in 1676:

  Be apprised of the fact that since some time ago the Hofwijck forest has been enlarged and beautified with four new shady avenues, and extended to impressive length, the result has been judged so beautiful and surprising, that those with most taste have concluded that it would be well worthwhile if the plenipotentiaries – both men and women – from Nijmeghen, instead of amusing themselves with trifles at Cleves, would abandon all matters of state there to come and admire Hofwijk’s magnificence … This forest has been decorated with numerous bowling balls, of such an exceptional size that they roll as if by themselve the length of these grand avenues, till they are lost from view, and quite otherwise than happens on the ‘bowling alleys’ and ‘bowling greens’ by the sea at Scheveling.35

  Temple and his diplomatic colleagues should therefore rush to Hofwijk, concludes Huygens. And he signs himself off: ‘the Marquis of Hofwijk, gobbler up of British ducats [won] at the game of quilles, “penny wise and pound foolish”’.

  The topographically demanding conditions for Low Countries gardening coloured, consciously or unconsciously, Dutch appreciation of gardens. Dutch travellers’ admiration was especially reserved for gardens that showed visible signs of a struggle between the aspirational owner and an unpromising location. We have a telling example of this during one of Constantijn Huygens senior’s early trips abroad, in spring 1620, when he was travelling as part of a diplomatic mission to Venice in the train of François van Aerssen, Heer van Sommelsdijck.36 Huygens’s diary of the mission reveals that they visited a number of gardens on their journey, among them the celebrated ones designed by Salomon de Caus at Heidelberg, home of Frederick, Elector Palatine, and his wife Elizabeth Stuart, daughter of the English King James I.

  The visit took place at a tense moment in the history of the Palatinate. In 1619, the Protestant Frederick had been persuaded to accept the Crown of Bohemia, rather than allow it to go to a Catholic claimant, and that autumn he and Elizabeth had left Heidelberg for Prague to take possession of their kingdom. Hardly had they arrived in triumph, when it became clear that the Catholic Hapsburg powers would not sanction Frederick and Elizabeth’s claim, and declared war against them. In November 1620 Frederick and his allies received a crushing defeat at the battle of the White Mountain, and the couple were forced to flee for their lives. Denied refuge by one northern state after another, they eventually arrived in The Hague, and the welcoming shelter extended by the Stadholder Frederick Hendrik to his nephew (his eldest sister’s son) and his wife. There they settled for the remainder of both of their lives, Elizabeth outliving her husband by thirty years, and becoming an increasing financial burden on and embarrassment to the house of Orange.37 Thus spring 1620 was the ominous calm before the storm, when it was all too clear how precarious was the hold of Frederick and Elizabeth upon power of any kind in the region.

  When the Dutch mission reached Heidelberg, they were received in style as allies and supporters of the ‘Winter King and Queen’, as they would become known, by Frederick’s mother, Louise-Juliana of Orange-Nassau, daughter of William I of Orange (William the Silent) by his first wife, Charlotte de Bourbon-Montpensier, and sister of the Dutch Stadholder. The Orange delegation was welcomed effusively by the Dowager Electress herself, and Huygens records with pride in his journal how he was singled out for special attention:

  I presented her with a letter from Madame the Princess of Orange [Louise de Coligny, third wife and widow of William the Silent], which she read, and, knowing who I was, welcomed me most warmly: asking cordially after my father, his health, his household, his children; thanking him for the affection and good will which he continued to show towards the descendants of his Excellency Monsieur the Prince her Father [i.e. the house of Orange], with all kinds of other assurances of benevolence and good will towards our family.38

  Taken on a tour of the castle grounds while the Ambassador was in closed conference, Huygens expressed special admiration for the way in which its renowned gardens had been created from ‘bare rock’ – evidence of a triumphant struggle against the natural limitations of the mountainous terrain:

  We were taken to see the beautiful Palace gardens, which are the more admirable for the fact that just four years ago there was nothing here but bare rock, like the rest of the mountain, which they had had to excavate to construct a fertile area of land. Which it presently is – bearing flowers, fig trees, orange trees, etc. in abundance. At the end of the garden are the grottos and fountains designed by Salomon de Caus, which are absolutely outstanding, outclassing all those in France in scale.39

  So at this moment of acute political precariousness for the Palatinate ruling family in Heidelberg, Huygens turns to the similarly precariously sustained palace gardens as a kind of emotional surrogate. His admiration for the visible struggle in these dramatic gardens between art and nature substitutes for the intensity of feeling circulating in the group waiting anxiously for the outcome of events taking place in Prague – perhaps, indeed, the Dutch-born Dowager Electress and the visiting Dutch Ambassador made some kind of reference to the parallel themselves. Not long after this visit, the palace and its grounds were laid waste by enemy invading forces, the remainder of the Elector’s family driven out, and the glorious gardens destroyed.

  Jacob Cats – Holland’s favourite poet and prominent politician during the coming-of-age of the Dutch Republic in the first half of the seventeenth century – claimed that it was his own clear understanding of the symbolic meaning of gardening for a nation constantly at war with the elements which led him to persuade the Orange Stadholder to make gardening his chief (and very public) recreation. When, in his poetry, he characterised Frederik Hendrik as ‘a sovereign much inclined to gardening’ (’een vorst tot planten seer genegen’), he meant intentionally to consolidate the propaganda image of this symbolic struggle to retain Holland as a fruitful land agains
t the invasive forces of sea and sand. In his poetic work on ‘Age, Country Life, and Garden Thoughts’, Cats claimed that he had encouraged the Stadholder to take an interest in gardens each time he visited Cats’s own estate at Sorgvliet (also among the sand dunes close to The Hague, and like Huygens’s rural retreat, selfconsciously named: ‘Flight from worldly care’). The Stadholder, Cats felt, should design great pleasure gardens, both for his own delight, and symbolically, to represent his role as guiding spirit of a nation dedicated to creating affluence and productivity out of unpromising packets of land rescued from the sea:

  Prince Henry being a sovereign to gardening much inclined

  Often came to see God’s great blessings here [at Sorgvliet] to find.

  His Highness was amazed when he would then discover

  That rich and sumptuous woods once empty grounds did cover.

  I told him, mighty Sovereign, you’re buying various lands

  And that at a high cost, but getting barren sands.

  Do turn them into woods, and from this dust despised

  Create a handsome arbour, let pleasure gardens rise.

  This is true Princely work, with Holland’s good in mind,

  And leads you to be praised for what you left behind.40

  As one historian of Dutch gardens puts it:

  The fight for land, the constant effort to keep it safe from the sea and foreign intruders, whether perceived as a real or an abstract threat, is one of the general themes and thoughts which have permeated not only Dutch culture in general but the art of Dutch gardening in particular. Land reclamation and cultivation and the creation of a peculiarly Dutch geometrical landscape interspersed with canals lay at the foundation of the art of gardening in Holland, so much so that the country itself became identified with a garden and its people with gardeners.41