Going Dutch_ How England Plundered Holland's Glory - Lisa Jardine [112]
George London’s close study of garden features and remarkable plants in Dutch gardens on behalf of Compton later stood him in good stead. After the 1688 invasion he became royal gardener to William III, and deputy to Hans Willem Bentinck as Intendant of the royal gardens.
Gaspar Fagel’s collection of exotic plants and shrubs, transported (or perhaps one should say ‘translated’) from Holland to Hampton Court Palace, was as much a part of William and Mary’s Dutch ‘invasion’ as the 1688 flotilla and the Torbay landing. That extended sense of the transfer of authority – cultural, aesthetic, intellectual as well as political – from one location to another is also illustrated by another Dutch garden, established with typical Dutch fortitude and determination in an overseas ‘settlement’ – Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen’s garden at Recife, in newly conquered Brazil.25
A distinguished Dutch military campaigner, friend and fellow art- amateur of Constantijn Huygens senior, and a distant cousin of the Stadholder, Johan Maurits became Governor-General of Dutch Brazil in 1637.26 Delighted by the topography around Recife, where he established his headquarters, which at once resembled the Netherlands in its water- surrounded flatness, and far exceeded it in the lushness of its flora, Maurits occupied the island of Antônio Vaz, where he set about establishing a model Dutch-style ‘new town’, with a regular grid of streets, central public squares and a system of gardens and canals, to be called ‘Mauritsstad’. He also built himself a palace in Recife, which he called the Vrijburg Palace, organised on as lavish a scale as the colonial context allowed, with extensive formal gardens around it.
A surviving description of the Vrijburg Palace garden shows how closely it conforms, in design and execution, to the gardens of Johan Maurits’s close friends Constantijn Huygens and Jacob Cats in a similarly flat, water-encircled landscape outside The Hague:
In the midst of that sterile and unfruitful sand a garden was planted, and all the species of fruit trees which grow in Brazil, and even many that came from other parts, and the strength of much other fruitful soil, brought from outside in shallow boats, and much addition of manure, made the place as well conditioned as the most fruitful soil.27
As at home in Holland, Maurits had trees brought in full-grown to form avenues for his new garden – only here in Brazil the trees were coconut palms:
The Count ordered [the coconut palms] to be fetched from a distance of 3 or 4 miles, in four-wheeled wagons, cleverly uprooting them and transporting them to the island, on pontoons set up across the rivers. The friendly soil accepted the new plants, transplanted not only with work, but also with ingenuity, and such fertility was passed to those aged trees, that, against the expectation of everyone, soon in the first year after transplanting, they, in a marvellous eagerness to produce, gave very copious quantities of fruit.28
In his handbook of tree husbandry, Sylva, John Evelyn cited Johan Maurits’s mature-tree transplanting with approval:
But before we take leave of this Paragraph, concerning the Transplanting of great Trees, and to shew what is possible to be effected in this kind, with cost, and industry; Count Maurice (the late Governour of Brasil for the Hollanders) planted a Grove neere his delicious Paradise of Friburge, containing six hundred Coco-trees of eighty years growth, and fifty foot high to the nearest bough: these he wafted upon Floats, and Engines, four long miles, and planted them so luckily, that they bare abundantly the very first year; as Caspar Barlaeus hath related in his elegant Description of that Princes expedition.29
Both these accounts were second-hand (Barlaeus never travelled to Brazil). A first-hand description of the Vrijburg garden by