Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland's Glory Read Online Free PDF Page B

all flower garden with beautiful fountains, which, however, did not work all the time. There were cypress trees some 18 or 20 feet high in all the avenues and stone statues everywhere. On the other side of the house were groves on either side with a lovely wide stream running through them, besides ponds with fountains. At the end of all this, however, there was a little house. On its roof reached by outside steps, was a pond with fish in it filled with fresh water running in through a pipe and running out through another continually. In this house was one of the finest and most charming grottos I recall ever seeing. 25

    At Wilton, once again, then, the emphasis is on a genteel struggle for stability and control of the land. But in the English case the battle is with political forces rather than with sea and sand. Driven into retirement on their country estates, deprived of office, and taxed severely for their Royalist involvement, old Royalists focused their energies into ambitious plans for their gardens. On their country estates, at least, they could continue to be masters of all they surveyed – though, fallen on hard times, they now charged the public for entrance to view their horticultural delights.
    There are, nevertheless, significant differences in emphasis between the Dutch tradition and developing garden styles in England. It is striking how much attention is paid, both in Dutch garden poems and in gardening handbooks, to trees and shrubs as the most significant and admired features of any well-planned garden, taking precedence over gorgeous displays of flowers in ingeniously intricate arrangements of beds, or even exotic fruits and unfamiliar vegetables. Avenues of elms or limes (fast-growing, and producing a desirably strong, erect tree, with the foliage high and spreading) were pronounced by visitors to be the glory of many a European garden, and particularly of Dutch ones. André Mollet – gardener to Charles I and Charles II in England, Frederik Hendrik in Holland, and Queen Christina of Sweden – makes it a first requirement of any royal garden that the associated house ‘be situated in an advantageous location, so that it can be adorned with all those things necessary for its beautification’, of which the foremost is
a grand double or triple avenue of trees, either elms, or limes (which are the two types of tree we consider suitable for this purpose), which avenue should be aligned at right angles to the front of the house, with a large semi-circle [bordered by trees] where it begins.

    In the 1651 edition of Mollet’s little book The Pleasure Garden , based on his most recent designs, for the gardens of the Queen of Sweden in Stockholm, there is a single chapter on ‘the flower garden’. In it, Mollet proclaims tulips ‘greatly to surpass even anemones in beauty and rarity, by reason of their being so admirably variegated and multi-coloured, in an infinity of colour-combinations – white, purple and blue, deep red and white, red and yellow, and many other diverse colours, up to five or six on the same flower – which makes them esteemed by the discerning above all other flowers’. 26 The rest of the book consists of discussions of trees and shrubs, including exotica like orange trees, lemon trees, myrtles and jasmines, which Mollet considers a worthy challenge for the skilled gardener to endeavour to grow successfully in cold northern climates.
    Here is another reminder of the ease of to-and-fro flow of artistic talent and creativity, backwards and forwards across national boundaries, in this case in the field of garden design. André Mollet, whose father had been a royal gardener in France, first came to England in the 1620s, possibly as a member of Henrietta Maria’s household. From there he went to the United Provinces, on the recommendation of Charles I (and most likely Constantijn Huygens), where he was responsible for garden designs at several royal palaces for Frederik Hendrik and