Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland's Glory (30 page)

In spite of the fact that, like Fagel, the twice-widowed Magdalena Poulle had no direct heirs, her extensive gardens at Gunterstein, complete with exotic plants, an orangery and hothouses, have, unusually among the Dutch seventeenth-century gardens, survived down to the present day. She acquired the ruined manor outside Utrecht in 1680 at public auction, and over the next two years built a classically-influenced country house for herself on the foundations of the old medieval one, and designed an extensive garden around it.

In a letter to Henry Wotton, John Evelyn reproached antiquity for its lack of interest in exotic plants and the nurturing of rarities under hothouse conditions. Where gardens were concerned, the ancients ‘had nothing approaching the elegancy of the present age’:

What they call their gardens were only spacious plots of ground planted with plants and other shady trees in walks, and built about with porticos, xystia, and noble ranges of pillars, adorned with statues, fountains, pis- cariae, aviaries, etc.

But for the flowery parterre, beds of tulip, carnations, auricula, tuberose, jonquills, ranunculas, and other of our rare coronaries, we hear nothing of; nor that they had such store and variety of exotics, orangeries, myrtle, and other curious greens; nor do I believe they had their orchards in such perfection, nor by far our furniture for the kitchen.
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On 16 July 1686, Evelyn sent a friend a list of the most famous gardens in the Dutch Republic, which he must see without fail. These included those of Hans Willem Bentinck (Sorgvliet), Lord Beverning, Gaspar Fagels, Daniel Desmarets, Madame de Flines (i.e. Agnes Block), Magdalena Poulle, Pieter de Wolff, and the Leiden
Hortus Botanicus
, as well as the Duke of Arenberg’s garden.
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Gardening enthusiasts like Gaspar Fagel and Magdalena Poulle sent out their specialist search parties across the known world, looking for exotic botanical specimens and exploiting every possible avenue for access to much-desired, difficult-to-get-hold-of items, which they would then rear lovingly in their hothouses and display ostentatiously in the outdoor urns that graced their terraces during the warm summer months.

In 1685 the Bishop of London, Henry Compton, sent his head gardener, George London, on a trip to the Dutch Republic to view and report back on gardening innovations there. One of the gardens he visited was Magdalena Poulle’s, where he compiled an inventory of the rarest and most remarkable plants he saw there, headed: ‘These elegants which stand together in the garden of the Lady of Gunterstein at Breukelen in the province Utrecht’. They included a coconut palm,
Sesbania grandiflora
(a shrub from Kerala with edible leaves and flowers), a coral tree from Brazil, sugar cane, carob, a clematis from Argentina or Paraguay,
Fritillaria crassa
(one of the fritillary family much featured in Dutch flower still-lifes),
Leonurus Capitis Bonae Spei
(from the Cape of Good Hope), hibiscus, delphinium,
Thlaspi sempervirens et florens
(from Persia), papaya and tamarind. All or most of these needed special conditions for successful raising, and indeed the hothouses at Gunterstein set a standard for those at the Physic Garden in Chelsea.

When Magdalena died, her brother put part of her orangery collection up for auction. It included ‘diverse sorts of Orange, Lemon, Myrtle, Jasmine, Camphor, Arbutus and double Oleander trees, together with many extremely rare and exotic shrubs, plants, roots and bulbs, collected over many years from many distant regions of the world’.
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George London’s close study of garden features and remarkable plants in Dutch gardens on behalf of Compton later stood him in good stead. After the 1688 invasion he became royal gardener to William III, and deputy to Hans Willem Bentinck as Intendant of the royal gardens.

Gaspar Fagel’s collection of exotic plants and shrubs, transported (or perhaps one should say ‘translated’) from Holland to Hampton Court Palace, was as much a part of William and Mary’s Dutch ‘invasion’ as the 1688 flotilla and the Torbay landing. That extended sense of the transfer of authority – cultural, aesthetic, intellectual as well as political – from one location to another is also illustrated by another Dutch garden, established with typical Dutch fortitude and determination in an overseas ‘settlement’ – Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen’s garden at Recife, in newly conquered Brazil.
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A distinguished Dutch military campaigner, friend and fellow art- amateur of Constantijn Huygens senior, and a distant cousin of the Stadholder, Johan Maurits became Governor-General of Dutch Brazil in 1637.
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Delighted by the topography around Recife, where he established his headquarters, which at once resembled the Netherlands in its water- surrounded flatness, and far exceeded it in the lushness of its flora, Maurits occupied the island of Antônio Vaz, where he set about establishing a model Dutch-style ‘new town’, with a regular grid of streets, central public squares and a system of gardens and canals, to be called ‘Mauritsstad’. He also built himself a palace in Recife, which he called the Vrijburg Palace, organised on as lavish a scale as the colonial context allowed, with extensive formal gardens around it.

A surviving description of the Vrijburg Palace garden shows how closely it conforms, in design and execution, to the gardens of Johan Maurits’s close friends Constantijn Huygens and Jacob Cats in a similarly flat, water-encircled landscape outside The Hague:

In the midst of that sterile and unfruitful sand a garden was planted, and all the species of fruit trees which grow in Brazil, and even many that came from other parts, and the strength of much other fruitful soil, brought from outside in shallow boats, and much addition of manure, made the place as well conditioned as the most fruitful soil.
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As at home in Holland, Maurits had trees brought in full-grown to form avenues for his new garden – only here in Brazil the trees were coconut palms:

The Count ordered [the coconut palms] to be fetched from a distance of 3 or 4 miles, in four-wheeled wagons, cleverly uprooting them and transporting them to the island, on pontoons set up across the rivers. The friendly soil accepted the new plants, transplanted not only with work, but also with ingenuity, and such fertility was passed to those aged trees, that, against the expectation of everyone, soon in the first year after transplanting, they, in a marvellous eagerness to produce, gave very copious quantities of fruit.
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In his handbook of tree husbandry,
Sylva
, John Evelyn cited Johan Maurits’s mature-tree transplanting with approval:

But before we take leave of this Paragraph, concerning the Transplanting of great Trees, and to shew what is possible to be effected in this kind, with cost, and industry; Count Maurice (the late Governour of Brasil for the Hollanders) planted a Grove neere his delicious Paradise of Friburge, containing six hundred Coco-trees of eighty years growth, and fifty foot high to the nearest bough: these he wafted upon Floats, and Engines, four long miles, and planted them so luckily, that they bare abundantly the very first year; as Caspar Barlaeus hath related in his elegant Description of that Princes expedition.
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Both these accounts were second-hand (Barlaeus never travelled to Brazil). A first-hand description of the Vrijburg garden by the Portuguese missionary Manuel Calado confirms that the effect of these ambitious garden-creating moves was a pleasure garden on the Dutch model – though there is some disagreement as to just how many palm trees were uprooted to frame its shady groves:

In this garden they put 2000 coconut palms, bringing them there from other places, because they asked the inhabitants for them, and they ordered them to bring them in carts, and with them they made some long good-looking rows, in the style of the tree-lined path of Aranjués, and elsewhere many trellised vines and beds of vegetables, and of flowers, with some summerhouses, and entertainment, where the ladies and their friends would go to pass the summer festivals, and to have their treats, and make their picnics and drinks as they do in Holland, with their musical instruments.
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In this recreation of the space of repose beloved of Dutch noblemen, Johan Maurits would walk ‘for pleasure’ with his guests to ‘show off’ his curiosities. Vrijburg became his favourite palace, and the garden his preferred place for spending any time he could spare from the business of government. As with those northern Netherlandish gardens, though, the pleasure offered by the Vrijburg gardens was short-lived. Even before they left Brazil in 1654, the Dutch themselves had begun to remove trees from the gardens, and by the end of the seventeenth century there was almost nothing left.

The to-and-fro exchange in garden lore nevertheless continued. Johan Maurits brought quantities of garden materials back with him to Europe on his return in 1644, where they contributed to his remarkable gardens at the Mauritshuis and at his palace at Cleves, where he became local Stadholder.
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It was he who advised Bentinck in detail on the design of his magnificent gardens at Sorgvliet, gardens which by around 1700 summed up the Anglo–Dutch collaborative project.

In May 1700 Bentinck married his second wife, the widow of Lord Berkeley of Stratton, Martha Jane Temple, the niece of the pro-Dutch diplomat, and connoisseur of gardens and garden art, Sir William Temple. She brought with her a dowry of £20,000, a large fortune which enabled Bentinck to enlarge his social ambitions considerably. Several of those writing to congratulate him on his remarriage suggested that in the pleasant retreat of a companionate marriage blessed with shared interests (i.e. gardening) he could indulge his passion for horticulture to the hilt. His gardens outside The Hague fully realised such aspirations.

In the academic literature on gardens and gardening in the seventeenth century, there tends to be a certain reluctance to tackle the financial side of the subject – not just the sheer size of expenditure, but the commercial and organisational arrangements for producing perishable goods for the horticultural market and purveying them to eager customers. I have touched several times on the high cost of designing, establishing and stocking a country estate, but I have been aware myself of a tendency to cite this with admiration, as evidence of passion and commitment to the enterprise. This is the point to talk about prices, and attitudes to the cost of maintaining so ephemeral a luxury as an ornamental garden, in constant need of replenishing and upkeep. And how better to do so than by describing so-called ‘tulipmania’ – the escalating price of tulip bulbs in the Dutch Republic in the 1630s.

In the mid-1630s the Dutch went wild about tulips.
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As Anne Goldgar describes in the most recent study of the subject, tulips were new to Europe (they were introduced in the mid-sixteenth century from Turkey), and they were rare. They were therefore expensive.

To us the ultimate in Dutch domesticity, in the 1630s this fragile and changeable bloom represented novelty, unpredictability, excitement – a splash of the exotic east, a collector’s item for the curious and the wealthy.
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For a short period, starting around the summer of 1636, prices for the bulbs of some particularly highly prized varieties of tulips rose to enormous heights. Tulip bulbs are by their nature objects on which it is possible to speculate financially. Those which promised to produce the most highly- sought-after variegated red-and-yellow, purple-and-white or red-and white flowers – because they had produced such blooms in the past, or were the offsets from bulbs that had – could be sold for very large sums. But the promise of the bloom lay resolutely in the future. What changed hands was a few small brown bulbs the size of an onion. The purchaser was obliged to accept the promise of a spectacular bloom on trust, and to pay upfront.

In early 1637 the bottom fell out of the tulip market. Speculative sellers who had bought bulbs at high prices to sell on at a profit found themselves with worthless items on their hands. Those who had purchased at the top of the market, and who would indeed see flowers as soon as the summer blooming season came around, nevertheless refused to pay the balance on the exorbitant amounts they had been foolish enough to part with for their prize purchases in the overheated market. Among those – from humble artisans to nobility – who had been caught up in the tulip craze, many were ruined, reduced to bankruptcy by purchase prices far beyond anything reasonable for a mere flower.

That is the story as it has traditionally been told. In fact, the truth was far less sensational. Prices of tulips did indeed inflate in the 1630s, and there was a ‘crash’ in 1637, but tulip bulbs continued to command serious prices throughout the seventeenth century, until they were finally displaced by the newly fashionable Oriental flower, the hyacinth. The tulip buyers and sellers were on the whole professional horticulturalists, and they sold to keen gardeners. One of the beauties of bulbs of any kind is that they can be bought in quantities to suit the pocket of the buyer. Where André Mollet bought tulip bulbs by the thousand to stock the parterres at St James’s Palace in London, owners of a small plot of land could purchase them individually to add colour and dash to a modest bed.

Bulb-buying represents the ordinary Dutch man or woman in the street’s access to and aspiration towards gardening, and control of their own little piece of earth. Since all paid taxes towards dykes and securing the borders of the nation, what could have been more natural than to join the élite in tilling one’s own garden? And indeed, it has been argued that the collapse of the tulip ‘bubble’ was the result of the market gardeners over-producing, thus driving prices down. By the time of the collapse of the tulip-speculation bubble, nursery gardeners’ initiative in this thriving market meant that tulips produced from seed were freely available for purchase, and the rarity value of particular varieties had disappeared.