Going Dutch_ How England Plundered Holland's Glory - Lisa Jardine [113]
In this garden they put 2000 coconut palms, bringing them there from other places, because they asked the inhabitants for them, and they ordered them to bring them in carts, and with them they made some long good-looking rows, in the style of the tree-lined path of Aranjués, and elsewhere many trellised vines and beds of vegetables, and of flowers, with some summerhouses, and entertainment, where the ladies and their friends would go to pass the summer festivals, and to have their treats, and make their picnics and drinks as they do in Holland, with their musical instruments.30
In this recreation of the space of repose beloved of Dutch noblemen, Johan Maurits would walk ‘for pleasure’ with his guests to ‘show off’ his curiosities. Vrijburg became his favourite palace, and the garden his preferred place for spending any time he could spare from the business of government. As with those northern Netherlandish gardens, though, the pleasure offered by the Vrijburg gardens was short-lived. Even before they left Brazil in 1654, the Dutch themselves had begun to remove trees from the gardens, and by the end of the seventeenth century there was almost nothing left.
The to-and-fro exchange in garden lore nevertheless continued. Johan Maurits brought quantities of garden materials back with him to Europe on his return in 1644, where they contributed to his remarkable gardens at the Mauritshuis and at his palace at Cleves, where he became local Stadholder.31It was he who advised Bentinck in detail on the design of his magnificent gardens at Sorgvliet, gardens which by around 1700 summed up the Anglo–Dutch collaborative project.
In May 1700 Bentinck married his second wife, the widow of Lord Berkeley of Stratton, Martha Jane Temple, the niece of the pro-Dutch diplomat, and connoisseur of gardens and garden art, Sir William Temple. She brought with her a dowry of £20,000, a large fortune which enabled Bentinck to enlarge his social ambitions considerably. Several of those writing to congratulate him on his remarriage suggested that in the pleasant retreat of a companionate marriage blessed with shared interests (i.e. gardening) he could indulge his passion for horticulture to the hilt. His gardens outside The Hague fully realised such aspirations.
In the academic literature on gardens and gardening in the seventeenth century, there tends to be a certain reluctance to tackle the financial side of the subject – not just the sheer size of expenditure, but the commercial and organisational arrangements for producing perishable goods for the horticultural market and purveying them to eager customers. I have touched several times on the high cost of designing, establishing and stocking a country estate, but I have been aware myself of a tendency to cite this with admiration, as evidence of passion and commitment to the enterprise. This is the point to talk about prices, and attitudes to the cost of maintaining so ephemeral a luxury as an ornamental garden, in constant need of replenishing and upkeep. And how better to do so than by describing so-called ‘tulipmania’ – the escalating price of tulip bulbs in the Dutch Republic in the 1630s.
In the mid-1630s the Dutch went wild about tulips.32 As Anne Goldgar describes in the most recent study of the subject, tulips were new to Europe (they were introduced in the mid-sixteenth century from Turkey), and they were rare. They were therefore expensive.
To us the ultimate in Dutch domesticity, in the 1630s this fragile and changeable bloom represented novelty, unpredictability, excitement – a splash of the exotic east, a collector’s item for the curious and the wealthy.33
For a short period, starting around the summer of 1636, prices for the bulbs of some particularly highly prized varieties of tulips rose to enormous heights. Tulip