Going Dutch_ How England Plundered Holland's Glory - Lisa Jardine [105]
A leading historian of seventeenth-century courtly gardens in Holland has characterised the early development of the Honselaarsdijk as ‘a constant struggle with water’. As Frederik Hendrik went about enthusiastically clearing the land surrounding the house for garden development, there was mounting concern about the provision of an appropriate drainage system. It was not simply a matter of plants and trees failing to flourish, as they did in waterlogged or marshy locations. The garden’s proximity to the sea meant there was a danger of the even more devastating effect of sea water on trees’ roots – the least suspicion of salt in the water, and delicate saplings would not thrive. Without adequate drainage, in the first years of the new garden layout, most of the newly-planted trees died from exposure to salt water which had seeped into the ground.3
In the summer of 1631, just as the gardens at Honselaarsdijk seemed well established, the most recently acquired lands were spoiled by salt-water flooding, and many valuable trees were lost. The royal accounts record repeated expenditure on digging additional drainage channels and sewers in an effort to control the flow of ‘redundant water which spoils the trees’. New drains were also constructed to ‘complete the drains in the two palm gardens laying next to the house Honselaarsdijk’.
In its original form, the garden at Honselaarsdijk consisted of a rectangular plot with a moat around it. As the garden was expanded, drains and water channels had to be improved and added to accordingly. First the ground was surveyed by professional surveyors, then the areas of land were rearranged so as to straighten out the existing erratic divisions of plots, and create a neatly organised collection of squares and rectangles, bordered by canals. To achieve this, marshy ground had to be reclaimed by digging ditches and throwing up small dykes. Irregular canals and streams which crossed the land were filled with earth. Once the ground had been reorganised in this way, trees and shrubs were planted, and the garden was ready for plants, urns, garden structures and statues, to create a pleasure garden proper.
When André Mollet arrived from Charles I’s court in London to lay out the parterres (the ornamental beds constructed out of box hedges, grass and fine gravel) at Honselaarsdijk, he insisted on a further drainage system being installed in the main ornamental garden, to prevent his intricate boxwood hedges from becoming waterlogged. Nevertheless, accidents continued to happen. A late-seventeenth-century tourist, visiting Honselaarsdijk, reported the forlorn state of all the plantations in the orangery due to salt-water seepage. Throughout the lives of these coastal Dutch gardens there was a continuing need for replanting, and for the replacement of damaged or dead trees. Dutch nurserymen developed a specialism (still current today) in growing trees for transplantation. They gained an increasing reputation for being adept at successfully digging up and replanting well-grown specimens to fill gaps in avenues or formal plantings. As John Evelyn enthused in his Sylva:
In Flanders they have large Nurseries of [white poplar trees], which first they plant at one foot distance, the mould light, and moist. […] As they increase in bulk, their value and price advance likewise; so as the Dutch look upon a Plantation of these Trees as an ample portion for a Daughter, and none of the least effects of their good Husbandry.4
By the seventeenth century, Dutch expertise in drainage and land reclamation was recognised Europe-wide. Not only were