Historical Gardens

According to a report in Haarlems Dagblad, Beeckestijn will become a centre for garden and landscape architecture. A spokesman of Vereniging Hendrick de Keyser reportedly said as much in a meeting with the Velsen town council last Thursday. Later this year a they will present a plan, together with prospected co-owner Natuurmonumenten. Dutch garden history [...]

The mayor and aldermen of Velsen yesterday announced that they plan not to sell the estate Beeckestijn. Instead, they will exchange the estate against land currently owned by the National Agency of Rural Areas (Dienst Landelijk Gebied -DLG). DLG is part of the department of Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality (Ministerie van Landbouw, Natuur en [...]

The ink of my previous post wasn’t even used (let alone had time to dry) when more news about restoration projects came to light. The Dutch funding institution VSBfonds reports it will invest € 3,8m in the restoration of 7 estates in The Netherlands. The estates are:

Reconstruction work in progress at Twickel, October 2007

Kasteel Horn, [...]

We have seen the announcement of two restoration projects in the last month, both in the province of Noord-Holland: Nijenburg (Heiloo) and Duinlust (Overveen).
Duinlust will see a restoration in the spirit of the design by the late nineteenth century architect Petzold, who redesigned the garden around a newly built house in the 1880’s. Current owner [...]

Always dreamt of living on an estate, surrounded by masses of designed landscape you won’t need to maintain yourself? Now’s your chance:Fürst Pückler’s Muskauer Park (Park Muzakowski) offers housing opportunities for people who don’t care about living in small houses, as long as the surrounding area offers plenty of agreable space. The park is situated [...]

The Dutch ministry of agriculture, nature and food quality (LNV) has presented an updated list of estates, falling under the Natuurschoonwet, which are open to the public. The Natuurschoonwet (difficult to translate) basically concerns a law, introduced in 1928 with the aim to protect estates by giving the owner fiscal benefits when they present suitable [...]

In this earlier post I mentioned the design by T. Henry Reetz for the garden of Paleis Het Loo, which discovery was made public by Cascade. They also mentioned that the upper part of the garden that had not been restored in the past decades, would be restored in 2007, taking this new design as [...]

Interesting stories emerge from documents produced by the council of Velsen. Finally, the minutes of the last debates of the old council have been published in November (debates dating back to Januari and March 2006). It is fascinating to see how desparate the former council was to get Beeckestijn sold before the elections in March [...]