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’ arrival, to assure the minimum of shock and damage to the fragile blooms. Two years later, some of the plants were still at Leeuwenhorst, waiting for suitable accommodation. On 3 March 1692, the remainder of Fagel’s collection, consisting of ‘orange trees, lemon trees, and other outlandish trees as well as shrubs, plants and herbs’, was valued, and 4,351 guilders paid to Fagel’s heirs. In August and September, when the weather was fine enough not to damage the trees and shrubs, they were transported to The Hague. Thence they were shipped to England in October. Garden tubs and their bulb contents, which William and Mary had not required, were sold to the Amsterdam Botanical Garden in 1691, and transported there in 1692.

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.22

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.23

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