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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 against 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, self-consciously 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

In a poem less well-known and anthologised than his garden poems, Andrew Marvell, who had travelled extensively in the Low Countries during the Civil War years, characterised Holland as a hapless piece of land created by its dogged people out of the detritus and leftovers of England:

Holland, that scarce deserves the name of Land,

As but th’Off-scouring of the Brittish Sand;

And so much Earth as was contributed

By English Pilots when they heav’d the Lead;

Or what by th’ Oceans slow alluvion fell,

Of shipwrackt Cockle and the Muscle-shell;

This indigested vomit of the Sea

Fell to the Dutch by just Propriety.

Less negative commonplaces concerning the Dutch and their land suggested that with the help of ‘Hollanders’ land could be secured against the sea almost anywhere.

The Dutch garden was a triumph of endeavour and ingenuity over a fundamentally unpromising environment. As transposed to England after the Restoration, the emphasis on tree-lined avenues and walks, and the regular expanses of water (as, for instance, at Hampton Court and St James’s) were a kind of homage to Dutch resilience and persistence. In combination with engineering-based drainage works at Hatfield Chase in Yorkshire, and in the East Anglian Fens, these features of the Anglo–Dutch landscape contributed a quality to the English countryside which has lasted down to the present day.

9

Paradise on Earth: Garnering Riches and Bringing Them Home

In the 1630s and ’40s, in the Northern Provinces, writers like Constantijn Huygens and Jacob