Historical Gardens

The sudden cutting of trees at Duinvliet and Elswout in Overveen might show I was right about the early landscape layout of part of the garden – which partly consists of the now disappeared Sandenhoeff.

A 19th century mixed avenue consisting of horse chestnut and common lime. That’s all.

Lion statues found at the Scott fountain in Detroit’s Belle Isle Park are inspired by ancient Egyptian statues now located in Rome. But copies of these Palatine lions already appeared in Europe decades earlier. The precise connection between them all remains uncertain.

Father and son Zocher are often mentioned as designers of the beech avenue at Keukenhof. An analysis of their rejected design (by lack of a preserved final one) casts some doubt on that assumption. They probably didn’t bother, or weren’t allowed to.

A small hill I ‘discovered’ on a bicycle ride near Goor in 2008 can now finally be identified as part of the garden layout of Wegdam.

In the course of a year I have come across very similar lion statues that can be found in Sweden, The Netherlands and Ireland. They are not only similar in shape, but they all seem to date from the third quarter of the 19th century (1850-1875). The description of the Irish garden by its owner/creator sheds light on the common source of all statues. Unsurprisingly, the source is found in Rome.

The story of the introduction of the landscape style in The Netherlands has proved to be difficult to uncover, despite many attempts. Information about the layout of those ‘new’ gardens in the form of maps or plans does not pre-date the late 1760s. Which plants were used to embellish the new type of garden with [...]

Interesting information has come to my attention in the last few months, and of course it has some bearing on the garden of Beeckestijn: avenues lined with two types of trees. On the Beeckestijn map (1772) we see such an avenue in the continuation of the central axis at the end of the garden, right [...]