Going Dutch_ How England Plundered Holland's Glory - Lisa Jardine [110]
Although his magnificent estate was rented, rather than owned outright, Fagel made sure to sign an undertaking with the landowner that all the plants introduced and cultivated there belonged to himself. He had selected the location with care, in a fertile, sheltered region already known for its market gardening, and from the outset his ambition was successfully to cultivate species hitherto unknown to Europeans – both flowering plants and fruiting shrubs. Over the twelve remaining years of his life he worked in close collaboration with horticulturalists in the service of the Dutch East India Company, paying for plants secured in the Far East to be tended in an intermediate garden at the Cape, to assure their robustness before they were transported to the Netherlands.
A visitor to the Cape en route for China in 1685 was astonished by the Dutch East India Company’s thriving botanical garden:
We were mightily surprised to find one of the loveliest and most curious Gardens that I ever saw. It contains the rarest Fruits to be found in the several parts of the World, which have been transported thither, where they are most carefully cultivated and lookt after.18
In his enthusiasm for the exotic, Fagel did not confine himself to trawling the colonies for new items for his gardens. In 1684 he took advantage of his fellow adviser to William of Orange, Hans Willem Bentinck’s being in London on a diplomatic mission, to request that he look out for plants for him in England. Bentinck replied that he was only too happy to oblige, and that he had already begun to make enquiries – it would help, he added, if Fagel could send him a list of the individual plant-species he was interested in.19 Eventually, the Leeuwenhorst gardens contained plants from the Cape of Good Hope, from Europe, the Mediterranean, North and South America, south and south-west Asia, the Canary Islands, Africa and Japan. Numerous overseas visitors record how impressed they have been by the facilities and the plants in Fagel’s gardens. His hothouses were the foremost in Europe at the time, and the orchids and pineapples he raised there were regarded as contemporary marvels. Shortly before his death a set of water- colours of the most exotic of his rarities was commissioned on behalf of William III himself, from the artist Stephanus Cousyns.20
Fagel died on 15 December 1688 (new style), just a week before the triumphant William III took up residence, first at St James’s Palace, and then, because his asthma made prolonged residence in smog-congested central London impossible for him, at Hampton Court Palace. Fagel’s family immediately sold the contents of his garden to William and Mary. By 1690 much of the collection was installed at Hampton Court. It is first recorded there on 26 April, when a group of ‘botanick acquaintances’ from Northamptonshire visited Hampton Court gardens by appointment, ‘to see the famous collection ther of the rare Indian plantes which mine Heer Fagel had gathered together’:
There is about 400 rare Indian plants which were never seen in England; and there is scarce any desirable Indian plant, but a specimen may be seen ther, and some very curious Indian plants are in so great perfection it is very wonderfull and scarce credible. The stoves [hothouses] in which they are kept are much better contrived and built than any other in England.21
The process of transplanting Fagel’s garden contents to Hampton Court was a protracted one, particularly since adequate facilities (for example, the extensive hothouses and glasshouses) had to be constructed ahead of the plants