Going Dutch_ How England Plundered Holland's Glory - Lisa Jardine [100]
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